Exchange Outlook Push Not working, Battery life Tanking, iPhone heats up!

I have seen several posts about this, but nothing that has been able to exactly describe my issue. I have a iPhone 3G on the latest firmware, 3.1.2. I was recently able to add my work exchange email to the phone and it worked fine with SSL disabled. At the time, we had not yet set up security on our OWA. Well that lasted about a week, then they decided to enable the security and since then, my push exchange mail with Outlook has not worked. I tried enabling the SSL feature on the phone and still no dice. As a result, my battery only lasts about 3 hours and the phone's physical temperature heats up. Once I delete the exchange account, the tempreceeds and the battery life returns to normal. I ahve been working closely with our IT guy and we can't seem to figure out what is happening and why it won't sync anymore. I get the error, "cannot get mail, the connection to the server failed" but in the setup, the exchange Account is verified. Any ideas?