MimeCast soups up email SAAS

MimeCast has upgraded its email archiving service to MimeCast Advanced, linking it more closely to exchange and adding better security, compliance and legal hold facilities.

MimeCast offers users the ability to archive emails, and will add unstructured files and SharePoint data in the future, to MimeCast data centres in the cloud. This is email, file and SharePoint archiving as a service.

Its new MimeCast Services for Exchange bring in folder-based replication along with more flexible email stubbing. This enables customers to set up policies that give them better control of mailbox size. It leaves a link in a user’s inbox with the full email or attachment remaining in the cloud until access is needed.

Folder-based replication enables users to retain a consistent view of their email whether accessing it direct through the server or through Mimecast webmail. It also provides for the central enforcement of policies that pinpoint the types and categories of information, and determines where and for how long the information is maintained.

Customers can apply granular corporate policy based around retention folders and associated retention periods.

MimeCast is also introducing a range of new capabilities such as granular Litigation Hold, E-discovery Case Management and Message Retention.

Litigation Hold prevents emails relating to any current or anticipated legal action from being deleted, while E-discovery Case Management allows multiple searches to be aggregated together alongside forward collection to provide a complete, legally admissible log of each case.

Metadata Removal helps prevent information being leaked by stripping background data such as tracked changes or previously inserted comments out of attachments before it is allowed outside the firewall.

Robert Crichton, IT Manager at MimeCast customer MacRoberts, provided a quote to die for: "Mimecast has provided us and our end users with ‘bottomless inboxes’ with ultra fast searching across message archives from their familiar email application... Some of the new features such as sub-folder archive replication, granular folder retention policies, and the litigation hold override and data purges, are the sort of blindingly obvious developments that make perfect evolutionary sense."

MimeCast is steadily adding to the amount of email data that is stored in and accessed from the cloud, as well as being archived in the cloud. At some stage in the future its customers could say, "Let's move the whole email caboodle into the cloud and just get out of local email management completely".

You do get the impression that the cloud computing and software as a service (SaaS) bandwagons are building up unstoppable heads of steam. The suppliers would certainly like us to think that - they are grateful that the recession is making all organisations look at cost-savings and look to transfer expenditure from CAPEX to OPEX wherever they can. ®