Mimecast provides everything an enterprise e-mail data management strategy needs in a ready-to-use online best practice configuration.
"This is a bold statement that we make re the Mimecast product," commented Garth Wittles, Managing Director for Mimecast SA, "but can your systems claim the following critical capabilities in its delivery of your enterprise e-mail data management strategy?"
Triple resilience - As data is received by the Mimecast Online it is dynamically written to the Mimecast Stor4 grid, the software of which ensures that all data is immediately written to at least three of its geographically diverse storage nodes, each housed in secure interconnected data centres. Each node has built-in redundancy to protect against individual device and media failure, as well as self-healing connectivity to other nodes to ensure completeness of resilience.
Dynamic data protection - Each node on the Stor4 grid is aware of its remote storage partners for all segments of data and is aware of its own role in protecting every piece of data within each segment. Should a node suffer from a partial or complete loss of data caused as a result of media failure or a catastrophic local disaster, normal system operations will continue unaffected. Once new media or a new node is allocated for redundant recovery, the failed node's remote partners will automatically rebuild the missing data and ensure the grid maintains triple redundancy.
Advanced data integrity - The Mimecast Stor4 software performs constant data integrity checks to ensure the data written to it is valid and complete at all times. Should any element of the data become corrupt, the system will detect and repair itself automatically from the other valid copies of the data available on the grid. This prevents any widespread corruption of data or an error outbreak condition as seen with other 'classic replication model' devices, where errors and corruptions are blindly replicated across the dataset.
Rapid data acceptance - Given the volume of e-mail data an enterprise can produce across its many mail servers on a daily or even an hourly basis, a centralised repository needs to be capable of reliably receiving, indexing, and securing a constant stream of new content. Mimecast Stor4 has highly optimised software processes to meet this challenge and balances loads across powerful multi-core node controllers with the raw processing power to accept substantial streams of data in real-time. Since a client's e-mail data comes from many different mail servers both inside and outside the business, Mimecast accepts external e-mails via the SMTP channel and internal mail from the various internal mail servers via a secure and native Microsoft Exchange Journal Hosting connector.
Always on - Mimecast offers guaranteed access to a company's data 24/7 for the full duration of the contracted retention period. This guarantee is only possible due to Mimecast's unique software architecture that ensures the continuous availability of data from multiple nodes on the grid at all times. This is important as no company can predict when historic e-mail data will be required by a user or to meet a strategic business requirement. Mimecast therefore keeps all of your data available to you at all times without compromise.
Search scalability - Without significant search scalability, a centralised enterprise e-mail data infrastructure will become slow and ultimately unusable. Delivering sub-second full text search and retrieval across large data volumes requires different software architectures and infrastructure than standard e-mail archiving platforms, and these are generally too expensive for normal organisations. Mimecast is the only provider with the technology to offer massively parallel search aggregation capabilities to fit the budget. These capabilities are essential for keeping search and retrieval performance acceptable across an enterprise's full e-mail data volume.
Tamper-proof, auditable and secure - Access to your data is only possible by your authorised administrators via a secure authenticated login to your Mimecast account. Mimecast supports authentication against your own Microsoft Active Directory as well as a local security database. All access to your data by your administrators is logged in a comprehensive access audit trail. Each file is encrypted uniquely for each client and receives a unique checksum on entry. Mimecast can therefore certify that the client's data has not been modified since it entered the grid.
Completeness of data - An e-mail data retention strategy is incomplete unless all the information pertaining to a message, its various versions, components, policies enforced upon it and forensic trace information is retained too. Forensic trace information such as proof of delivery information which is usually only held temporarily at the Internet e-mail gateway level is critical to being able to prove data validity.
Mimecast retains all the key information such as which mail server the message was accepted from and delivered to, the greeting received by the respective servers, the data transmission start and end time-stamps, and the final acknowledgements issued from and to these servers. Without this information it may not be possible to conclusively prove that a message was delivered by you to your intended recipient, or indeed that a message was received from who you purport it to have come from.
Mimecast is the only e-mail data management platform that records the full trace dataset. Other on-premise archiving tools are disconnected from the actual receipt and delivery actions performed at the gateway and as such lack the completeness and integrity of this vitally important data.
Flexible information access - Providing useful access to vast repositories of e-mail data can be challenging. Mimecast provides flexible tools to enable you to meet the demands for information that your business will have. For example: saved searches, smart folders with permission-based views, export as PST options, personal archive searches, and content or document-specific searches. Mimecast offers rich message mining capabilities that make tasks that seemed impossible in the past happen in sub-seconds.
Single view of global e-mail data - Delivering a single online archive and searchable view across an enterprise's entire global e-mail dataset is not trivial. Mimecast delivers this seamlessly by rapidly aggregating and indexing data from any number of mail servers on your networks around the world. This removes the need for multiple fragmented local e-mail archive systems and complex discovery processes. Mimecast Stor4 delivers the storage and search power to offload the intense demands of global e-mail data management from your in-house resources.
Mimecast provides your business with a powerful corporate memory that can be accessed quickly, easily and securely to meet today and tomorrow's business demands.
For further information, please contact Mimecast RSA: telephone (011) 555 5460, fax (011) 555 5479, e-mail info@mimecast.co.za.
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Mimecast is a fast growing Web 2.0 success story. Founded in the UK in late 2002, the company's proprietary 'software as a service' platform provides businesses around the world with mission critical e-mail management services. Mimecast provides the industries only comprehensive enterprise e-mail management solution from a single scalable web based platform. Clients save significant time and expense by connecting their existing in-house e-mail systems to Mimecast. They benefit from a range of services including long-term e-mail storage, search and information management, security services including anti-spam and anti-virus, compliance, policy control and risk management, business continuity, and e-mail marketing.
Services on the Mimecast Network are sold by leading technology resellers and on a direct basis into strategic accounts. Mimecast consistently beats competitive alternatives by offering a broader solution, better value for money, more effective security, faster performance, and by placing significantly greater levels of administrative control in our clients' hands. In contrast, established first generation 'managed service providers' competing in Mimecast's chosen market face significant challenges due to their inflexible and fragmented technology, high third party licensing costs and outmoded service delivery strategies.
Mimecast's customers include AFGRI, Barnard Jacobs Mellet Holdings, De Beers Retail, Eurosteel, Gold Fields, Heraeus Chemicals, Hollard Insurance, International Marketing Council, Markinor, Moores Rowland, Mortimer Harvey, National Union of Mine Workers, RandGold Resources, Transnet Group and Touchline Media.
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