What is the minimum annual overhead required to admin an On-Premises Exchange Server

Solution 1:

A data point.

I manage about 24 Exchange servers for customers now, and spend about 2 hours per month on mail-related issues which may include SSL certificates, user management, managing the Barracuda cloud spam filtering and disk space/backup maintenance.

Exchange is pretty hands-off for me post-install, however, the ramp up to installation/deployment is very time consuming.

These are all simple single-server Exchange environments with 250 users or less.