After years of meritorious service by providing a single unified management console that is easy to use and optimized for managing on-premises, online or hybrid deployments, and other purposes, Exchange Server 2013 will be retired in April 2023.
The alternative, Exchange Server 2019, is designed to improve security by introducing TLS 1.2 and soon TLS 1.3 as the default protocol for client connections and disabling legacy authentication, which is vulnerable to interception and brute force attacks.
In addition, Outlook needs to be enabled in Exchange 2013 before Exchange 2019 can be configured, and there are improvements in compliance and data loss prevention, as well as privacy updates.
To reduce patching, Exchange 2019 runs on Windows Server Core. It is also necessary to use Windows Server 2019 or Windows Server 2022. The functional level of the Active Directory forest on Windows Server 2012 R2 can be maintained during migration, although the user may want to improve performance later by upgrading.
A performance-diversifying architecture is no longer required for Exchange 2019 but is designed to make the most of the available hardware while isolating outages, eliminating the need for more than two server roles. Mailbox includes the transport service and mailbox databases as well as client access services such as authentication, redirection and proxying, which played their own role in Exchange 2013. Edge Transport, which is used outside the Active Directory forest to handle internet-facing mail flow, reduces the attack surface of the Exchange server while adding an additional layer of malware protection.
The sources for this piece include an article in TechRepublic.
