I wanted to build up a series of blog posts around my first experience with implementing the Mimecast solution. These posts will be part of an on-going series, as we progress throughout the project so please check back our look at our twitter feed for more details. Before diving into the detail I want to give an overview (in my opinion) of what the Mimecast Solution has to offer and then the reason(s) for selecting this product for the company I am working for at present.
Mimecast offer a complete cloud based unified messaging platform that offers the following services. It is worth noting that Mimecast are currently the best of breed within the industry and look at the Bloor report for Best Practice Email Archiving comes top:-
1. Email Security, Anti Virus and Anti Spam filtering.
2. Email continuity – if you Exchange (internal or cloud hosted, such as Office 365 / BPOS) server goes offline then the Mimecast client (additional module) will redirect the traffic to the Mimecast cloud.
3. Email archiving – the default is 10 years but you have the option of unlimited storage, yes that’s right UNLIMITED..! Microsoft Office plug-in to search the archive – just like a PST file.
4. eDiscovery and Litigation – the ability to securely search for mails or mailboxes under investigation. You can define a very tight sign off and auditing procedure for this.
5. Email Migration – One of the biggest selling points of the continuity elements are the benefits to aiding Exchange migration to 2007 / 2010 or even off premise.
6. Blackberry continuity – those Blackberry outages last year are a thing of the past with Mimecast’s solution. The ability to invoke Blackberry DR and route all your RIM email traffic through the Mimecast cloud.
7. Email Branding – the ability to multi-brand emails based on users, Active Directory groups, email addresses etc and have some limited reporting on how many recipients click back.
8. Secure attachment portal – remove the attachment and email the recipient a link to retrieve the document from a secure portal.
9. Convert attachments – convert attachments based on a rule-set to PDF.
10. Online based portal – Web based admin portal and Blackberry / iPhone based application to search the archive.
11. 100% Uptime and SLA – yes I said it Mimecast claim to offer 100% – I will report back on this.
12. Data Sovereignty – yes, this is a massive benefit for me and one that I think will make cloud providers stand out – UK based data, securely encrypted within the UK (the data is written to a number of data centres at once).
As you can see with all the above features there is no wonder why this has become a truly “best of breed” technology. Now the reasons for purchasing in this example is to replace an on-site email archiving, consolidate the current email security devices, dramatically reduce the onsite email storage, improve email continuity and provide a lower TCO.
So where am I now?
The process of implementing and on-boarding the Mimecast service is one of the best I have ever seen so far. Very positive, organised and informational at each of the 3 phases:
1. Configure Outbound Routing.
2. Configure Inbound Routing.
3. Data Ingestion – Configure Exchange servers, export the data and roll out the Outlook client / plug-in.
Mimecast have a very good knowledge base system and provide free online training. You get assigned dedicated engineers to assist at each phase with information provided via email, PDF and direct contact with the engineer.
The next post will going into the phase 1 Outbound configuration testing.