Remove On Premises exchange Hybrid and go fully Online

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BrianSmith wrote:

I have a scenario somewhat similar. All mailboxes, DL's, and contacts are in the cloud. I'm using AADSync to sync passwords to Azure AD. All email management is done in the cloud, nothing in on-prem Exchange. What's the need to keep the on-prem Exchange other than Microsoft's "Because I said so"?

 

Some replies say that it's minimal, but it's more than that. It's an OS license, it's patch management, it's still uses resources, still needs to be backed up. There is still a lot of maintaining there. I want the on-prem gone since it's not being used.

 

Also, we don't use AD FS and all DNS records, MX, autodiscover, cname, etc, have been pointed to O365.

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I can only say that, so far, about 2 months into the transition I don't miss the on-premise Exchange server at all.

I've gotten used to simply managing our AD accounts using the attribute editor and syncing everything using AAD.

Of course, I don't know how things might eventually evolve over those next few years..maybe there'll be indeed a server-side change on Microsoft's part which would eventually require an on-premise Exchange server for necessary AD schema additions..but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Like you said, keeping an on-premise Exchange around, even if just for management purposes, is just too much of a hassle and completely negates the primary motivation of moving everything to the cloud in the first place.

I really hope Microsoft corrects their stance on this particular issue, it really is quite bewildering.