E-mail remains one of the most widely used communication tools by the mobile workforce and must, therefore, remain readily available to users.
"IT decision-makers have many options available in terms of migrating their e-mail environments to the cloud, which include private hosted exchange, multi-tenanted hosted exchange and Office 365," says Elize Holl, marketing director at Mimecast, commenting on the results of the ITWeb/Mimecast Email Security and Archiving Survey, which ran online for 14 days during July.
"The uptake in these cloud services has considerably increased due to IT management recognising the benefits of not having to be burdened by licensing challenges, disaster recovery, hardware requirements, and support and maintenance requirements, which will result in a decrease in the deployment of on-premise exchange."
According to the survey results, 41% of respondents chose on-premise Exchange 2010 as their preferred e-mail architecture, while hosted exchange came in second, at 18%.
Holl says there are a number of overwhelming benefits and value adds, in terms of risk mitigation and reduction in cost and complexity, which have been the driving forces in persuading organisations to adopt cloud services.
"The idea of managing an exchange environment through a service provider's SLAs will often be more attractive to organisations, as opposed to managing a complex e-mail environment themselves," Holl adds.
Centralise to take control
Only 19% of survey respondents said their organisations operate their e-mail systems across one location.
"In a world where end-users are empowered through BYOD [bring your own device], which provides user access to e-mail and information remotely, and cloud services such as Mimecast, to provide seamless continuity, among other things, the requirement to run a multi-site exchange environment has changed," says Holl. "Organisations are looking to centralise their infrastructure to take control of their messaging platforms and reduce the cost and complexity in maintaining a complex exchange environment, which requires additional resources, maintenance and, ultimately, results in extensive operational expenditure."
An overwhelming majority (98%) of survey respondents were unsure of how their organisations ensure the integrity, availability and security of their data.
Holl believes organisations employing disparate solutions to apply retention and security of information will not be able to maintain the integrity of information, as these solutions offer no, or very little, integration, which, therefore, limits their ability to prove that the full chain of custody is maintained.
Holl explains: "The key to ensuring integrity, availability and security of data is to look to a resilient, infinitely scalable, single cloud service solution that is capable of storing all information perpetually in an immutable and encrypted format, while maintaining its full chain of custody through its entire life cycle. This way, organisations can validate what changes have been made to the information when originally processed for delivery and storage by the service."
Commenting on how organisations can improve on leakage of confidential data and what steps or strategies can be put in place to prevent this, Holl advises: "In light of the POPI Act, among other regulatory legislation being enforced by government in the near future, companies are being forced to look at solutions to prevent the leakage of both their intellectual property and personal information belonging to that of their employees."
The key to achieving success in terms of protecting an organisation's information is to have a data leak prevention solution in place that can apply security consistently across all information, recommends Holl.
She adds: "Secondly, organisations need to understand what information to look for to ensure they meet regulatory requirements based on their type of business. Lastly, appoint a task team that is trained to work with the DLP [data loss prevention] service to ensure the proper procedure is adhered to when performing e-discovery tasks, to ensure integrity and evidential quality of information is maintained.
Some 20% of survey respondents said their organisations do not use third-party cloud services to transmit large files outside of e-mail, while 34% use FTP files and 34% use Dropbox. According to Holl, the risk here is that using third-party commercial cloud services does not ensure security of confidential information and that, in order to achieve a tight control of large files being sent outside the organisation, one needs to look at solutions tailored to specifically address this need.
"The cloud offers prompt return on investment and additional value-added service, which should make perfect business sense to any organisation, but only if the right service provider is selected based on the service requirements. Any cloud service that can reduce complexity, mitigate risk and assist IT management in cutting down on costs, while providing the necessary service to ensure they become compliant in terms of information security, continuity and archiving, should be a good fit," Holl says.
"The perfect service provider should provide a cloud platform that allows customers to leverage cloud services in an easy and efficient way, both today and in future. Key considerations should include outcomes such as increased employee productivity, mobility, increased IT resource efficiency and forensic e-discovery options, all resulting in a valuable return on investment."
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