Remote email services transform economics of IT management

Why? Because prices have come down so much, the services being offered are so all-encompassing and the alternative is the traditional drag of separate, inefficient, costly, time-consuming and ultimately flawed systems and processes. That’s certainly the view of Peter Bauer, CEO of email services provider Mimecast, and he claims that his company’s offerings are going down a storm. Which is hardly surprising: with Mimecast, full email security, continuity and archiving come in at just £50 per user per year. So a 100-seat organisation can expect to pay £5,000 per year and that’s it. “Compare that to the traditional fragmented approach,” says Bauer. “Even with its shortcoming, you’re going to see costs well in excess of that when the first additional hardware bill comes in from Dell.” What’s covered? His is an online service providing for unified email management and combining all the disciplines in a single offsite Internet-based service. So he cites AV, data leak prevention, policy management etc to secure the email environment; email archiving online with data retained for up to 10 years; and email continuity with auto-failover accessed by web browser. “Outside IT, people just don’t know how many applications are involved for this in the conventional setup, or just how fragmented it all is. Email hygiene, archiving, policy control and database administration are a huge drain on most companies IT budgets – certainly disproportionate to the benefits,” says Bauer. There’s also the legal aspect: Bauer asserts that some web-based archiving systems lose forensic address data, essential if legal proceedings ensue, while others process all traffic prior to rule-based distribution to the local network or trapping in the spam filter –amounting to acceptance in law, whether messages reach their final destination or not.