Mimecast's long-term plan is to transform data archives to become information banks in the cloud, which would see organisations getting a return on the information they store.
This emerged this week when the unified e-mail management solutions provider celebrated its 10th anniversary at an event in Johannesburg. Speaking at the event, Mimecast's customer experience officer, Garth Wittles, said the company's long-term plan is to be a safe place to store business data.
Also speaking at the event, Nathaniel Borenstein, Mimecast's chief scientist, used a brief history of the banking industry as an analogy for Mimecast's new plan. He said banks used to be institutions where individuals would simply save their money, before they started protecting it, and later, providing interest from the savings. He pointed out that Mimecast is taking the same route in its strategy.
Borenstein believes that centralised, professionally administered cloud-based archives have become the starting point for new business intelligence, visualisation and other applications.
"As more of an organisation's information is consolidated into a single data store, the cost of mining and analysing such data can be amortised across a large number of similar organisations. This will bring enterprise-scale business intelligence to smaller companies that could never before afford it," he said.
He also pointed out that the archive of the future will function as an information bank; not just storing data, but analysing it, repurposing it, and giving it back to its owners in new and more useful forms.
"Archive-based BI will become a key part of your team," he said. "Today, we scan e-mails for credit details; tomorrow, we will scan for account violation and we will certainly get potential savings for audits."
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