Centralised e-mail archiving for the enterprise is an in-house nightmare! Mimecast with its Stor4 architecture provides the best, if not only, complete solution.
Today, centralised e-mail data management is a critical requirement for every business. Without it, companies can lose control over their important and valuable electronic information, and thus cannot effectively meet operational and legislative requirements.
Organisations that leave the management of e-mail data in the hands of their end-users, lack the control needed to guarantee that their data is secure, discoverable and available when it is needed. However, creating a secure central repository of all business e-mail data can be an expensive and technically complex undertaking.
Although there are numerous e-mail archiving products available in the market, each requires the purchase and deployment of expensive redundant hardware, software and a complex integration into local networks before any benefits can be realised.
In-house e-mail archiving projects tend to consume a disproportionate percentage of budgets relative to other IT initiatives as a result of their complexity, the requirements for off-site backup and the growing and unpredictable data volumes involved.
Most IT managers are new to the responsibility of maintaining the availability of e-mail data for multi-year periods. A significant amount of new e-mail data is created and received every day and each day marks the beginning of a new multi-year data retention period.
Business continuity planning dictates that this data must be stored on resilient hardware and be backed up, ideally in real-time, to one or more off-site locations. As data volumes grow, traditional backup and recovery strategies or disk-to-disk replication approaches fast become ineffective. Data volumes simply grow too large too quickly to store and secure effectively within budget, time and technology constraints. In addition, this information is also expected to be online, searchable and instantly retrievable by the business at all times.
Attempting to meet these requirements with in-house systems drives significant capital, staff and operating expenses into a business and often results in a sub-optimal solution and additional costs need to be borne year over year as these systems are extended and patched, thus eventually creating a legacy data repository.
Additionally, finding staff with the relevant experience is becoming an increasingly arduous task. Furthermore, once on-board they often prove to be extremely difficult to retain, since these skilled resources are in high demand and the incentives to move elsewhere are very attractive. It is unlikely that the recruitment costs and training investment made in these resources will ever be realised.
A real challenge is faced when on-site and multi-site e-mail archiving systems do not scale at a software level and cannot perform adequately when required to handle large and rapidly growing volumes of data. With message volumes on the rise and average file attachment sizes increasing steadily, correctly sizing and scaling an in-house e-mail data management system inevitably involves guesswork.
Mistakes can be costly once large volumes of data hit a performance degradation threshold. Any change of platform required also involves significant expense as well as downtime and potential data loss. Besides software scalability, hardware and backup facilities also need to scale and providing these facilities can involve substantial recurring costs. Consequently a seemingly simple operational requirement can quickly turn into a significant long-term financial and technical burden in what could be an organisations' entire multi-year e-mail data set.
Because effective e-mail data management is vital to every business, IT departments need a practical strategy that is low risk and future-proof, immediately available, affordable, easy to implement and manage, and critically, has a predictable cost profile over the many years of e-mail data management that lie ahead.
The solution:
Mimecast provides everything an enterprise e-mail data management strategy needs in a ready-to-use online best practice configuration.
The backbone of Mimecast's data retention service is Mimecast Stor4 - a geographically diverse highly available, secure and resilient storage and information management grid. Mimecast Stor4 is a unique software system designed by Mimecast to meet the new business challenge of providing high performance high availability data retention services to thousands of customers simultaneously, on an extremely cost-effective Internet-based system.
Mimecast Stor4 is fully integrated into the Mimecast platform so that clients can benefit from a completely unified and holistic e-mail management service. The Mimecast Stor4 grid is served from a geographically diverse best of breed storage hardware and high performance 64-bit computing infrastructure.
This infrastructure is housed in highly secure data centres behind layers of advanced security technology. Mimecast offers the industry's most sophisticated multi-tenant online e-mail storage solution with unmatched levels of search performance, data security, availability and resilience.
Mimecast provides the software application services as well as the physical network, computing and storage infrastructure required to deliver comprehensive unified e-mail data management. The service incorporates real-time e-mail continuity services, long term e-mail retention, compliance, discovery and information management tools, comprehensive gateway based e-mail security and policy controls and the most sophisticated online Message Transfer Agent and enterprise intra-organisation routing functions available in the market. With this technology, Mimecast is responsible for the safe delivery, storage, and management of hundreds of millions of messages for thousands of businesses worldwide every day.
For further information, please contact Mimecast RSA: tel 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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