About 1 year ago I was introduced to the Mimecast Regional Director for the Middle East when he came to our offices looking for local Business Partners as a part of their new Middle Eastern Operations start-up. I will admit that at a first glance, their solution seemed hardly different from those offered by the host of other Hosted Email Security companies out there, that is, until their Technical Director came down and we did a technical deep dive into the offering and platform behind it.

In short, after our deep dive, it became apparent that not only was their offering significantly different to that of everyone else but it was backed by state of the art technology that would ensure the continued success of the solution.

Now, just over a year later, I have been working with the solution and come up with my own top 10 reasons why I think Mimecast Rocks and everyone out there should at least be considering it. I am going to share those with you now.

1.  Virtually Eliminate Email Downtime

Imagine a world where deploying a small Outlook Plug-in via Group Policy, SMS, SCOM or your preferred software deployment mechanism could increase even your single deployment of Exchange server can increase your Email Availability Service Level Agreement to 99.999%. Well it exists. With Mimecast Express, you get guaranteed five 9s availability for email services and without the requirement of implementing additional hardware, software, data centers or any capital expenditure for that matter.

2.  Compliance and Forensics

The Mimecast Platform provides unprecedented levels of immutable forensics for all email based transactions, whether internal (when using Mimecast Express, Enterprise or Advanced) or external (when using Mimecast Protect, Express, Enterprise or Advanced.) Customers have the ability to see who has logged into the console, what actions they have performed, the complete transport details of a specific message, what policies have been applied and more.

What’s more is that the granular administrative permissions allow organizations to grant their staff only those permissions appropriate to perform the tasks for which they are authorized.

3.  Granular Policy Control

The Policy Control which is built into the solution allows you to apply settings, policies and even stationary based on Active Directory Organizational Units, Active Directory Groups, Sending Domain, Recipient Domain, Sender Address, Recipient Address and more. This level of flexibility can be used to ensure that each and every email that is delivered meets the base corporate security policy requirements. E.g. an organization can specify that any email to their auditors MUST be transported in and encrypted tunnel over TLS to protect the contents.

4.  Standardize Email Stationary

Email is more and more becoming a primary means of communication for businesses in the Connected World. Organizations that wish to maintain Brand Integrity are required to apply standardized stationary to all outbound email communications, just as for many years before they have used letterhead stationary for all official communications. Third party solutions that introduce this functionality typically have an impact on the sending email server as they make the changes at the transport level before the message leaves the system. Stationary Standardization, applied by the granular policies mentioned before, can now be implemented by the same solution you use for Business Continuity, Archiving, Security and more at the gateway level. There are no limits to the stationary formats you can apply, add the capability to include e-shots of your latest success story, holiday greeting or corporate message and you have a true trend setter here.

5.  Archive with Bottomless Storage

Email Archiving is one of the biggest topics in the world today. Storage, while becoming cheaper year by year, is still expensive. Particularly where Shared Storage such as SAN’s are concerned, Mimecast offers its Enterprise and Advanced Package Subscribers the opportunity to archive ALL of their Email Information in real-time for 10 or more years.

The storage is immutable, only through a dual authentication procedure can a message be removed from the archive, the forensics attached to the platform and built-in encryption allow any email evidence supported to the Court of Law in the United Kingdom to be accepted without question.

Unlike other vendors in this space, customers are not billed separately for archive storage, so there is no “Per Gigabyte, Per Anum” fee associated with the service and what’s more is that you get to keep a lean, mean, email machine and reduce your overall TCO on SAN solutions.

6.  Comprehensive E-Discovery

Organizing and finding the masses of information we accumulate over the years is something each one of struggles with today on a personal level. Now imagine the trouble a company that has been operating for a number of years must be going through, not to mention the odd attach from the disgruntled employee or unwitting strike of the careless ones.

Mimecast helps organizations address this issue, for email at least, by providing a single centralized store of information that is indexed at granular levels and can be searched at the “click of a button” from within Outlook itself or for advanced e-discovery cases from the Mimecast Personal Portal. What’s more is that users have complete visibility of their own information, administrators have visibility of the Sender, Recipient, Subject, and Message Header information and ONLY the Information Officers in the company have the authority to view all content within the repository.

7.  Messaging Platform & Version Independence

So because Mimecast is a hosted solution that works on the standard SMTP and HTTP protocols, it can be integrated with virtually any email platform. There are, of course, differences in the features and functions you are going to be able to take advantage of if you are on one platform or the other.

The best and most complete set of features are available with Microsoft Exchange Server, however, Lotus Domino (Notes) comes a close second and all other messaging platforms perform equally at third. What’s more, unlike the on-premise archiving and backup solutions, you do not have to wait for your vendor to “catch-up” to support your messaging platforms latest release, you can simply move with the peace of mind that there will be no interruption or affect on your message flow or archive storage.

8.  Improved Network Security

I love the concept of Hosted Security Solutions, particularly when it comes to email. They take all the risk of dealing with the malware and only send the good stuff to my door.

I like to think of it as a similar service to that provided by the security gate/guard in a secure or gated community. Only those people who have the right to go inside are permitted to enter, everyone else gets turned away at the gate. This is so much more convenient than me having to keep answering the door bell and turn away all those pesky disturbances.

The way I see it, once the threat is at your door (firewall,) your risk factor is that much higher.

On a final note, and this will not apply to all, however, here in the Middle East where bandwidth is akin to gold in value and sometimes even more valuable, using such a solution will free up masses of this precious resource for you to use in a more constructive (and hopefully profitable) way.

9.  Mimecast Technology

What Google does for the Web (internet,) Mimecast does for email. What do I mean by that? Well let me explain. The Mimecast Solution is purposely built and designed from the ground up based on a  Compute Cluster Grid Architecture. This means two things;

         i.             It is the only solution out there that is a true Unified Email Management Application. Other solutions in the market are made up of a combination of OEM Technologies (e.g. Symantec BrightMail + Dell MessageOne + Fortiva) which have been integrated and a limited end-user management interface created with all other settings and functions managed by the service provider on a change replication SLA of between 4 & 24 Hours. Mimecast is a single platform with a single management console and this allows them to give you complete control over every aspect of how your email is secured, stored, managed and more. What’s more is that when a policy is applied or reversed, it is applied across the entire platform and becomes affective immediately.

Support is also a breeze with them since it’s their platform, they have the developers, the train their people. I am sure this one is a bit of a no brainer so I am not going to go into one.

       ii.            The Compute Cluster Grid binds together the Processors, Memory and Direct Attached Storage of hundreds of entry level HP DL 185 servers into a single massive multi-processor super computer that is capable of processing queries and returning results in milliseconds. It is definitely not only the processing power that helps with this, but also the performance of hundreds of spindles working together.

To top this off, each Grid is made up of 3 Geographically Dispersed Datacenters, each of which has a copy of your data written to it as the data arrives in a synchronous fashion. That’s right, there is no SAN Storage and therefore no Storage Replication involved so the chances of data corruption or data loss are virtually zeroed out.

All data is cryptographically hashed then AES 256 bit encrypted and the encryption keys scattered across the Grid, this means that should someone gain access to even an entire single datacenter, they cannot gain access to the data.

To protect from Server, Storage or Data Center Failure, the Grid is built to use the crypto checksums to self heal and therefore maintain the availability of systems and data while the failure is resolved.

 

10.  SaaS Delivery Model

The Saas Deliver Model simply allows you to, unlike on-premise solutions, have the solution up and running in as little as a couple of hours from the time of purchase without the need to invest in expensive hardware, software, systems integration and potential downtime during the integration phase. It is 100% a plug & play solution that fits into any on-premise messaging solution without hassle.