Mimecast adds critical security for Office 365 porting 

Businesses are under increasing pressure, both internally and from customers and partners, to port on-premise applications to the cloud. Many of them, understandably, are nervous about the impacts of the process, even if they are keen to make the move. Many are also well-entrenched users of the Microsoft product family.

They are now the target for Mimecast, an enterprise cloud services provider, which has announced services to support enterprises moving to Microsoft Office 365 by directly addressing risks associated with data redundancy, high availability and the need for protection against targeted attacks.

 Mimecast’s new services build on Office 365’s key benefits – lower total cost of ownership (TCO), greater agility, reduced complexity and improved collaboration – by providing CIOs with a range of additional cloud services that mitigate the risk of moving mission-critical applications like email, as well as corporate data, to a single cloud vendor.

“Increasing numbers of organisations want to move their messaging, email and archiving to the cloud. But moving these critical services to a single cloud vendor then raises additional concerns for many that still need to be addressed before they are willing to move,” said Orlando Scott-Cowley, director of technology marketing at Mimecast. “The combination of Microsoft and Mimecast cloud services means even the most conservative of enterprises can embrace the cloud, and decommission the expensive on-premises solutions that have built up on the LAN.

“Moving to the cloud doesn’t negate the need for a broad and effective business continuity plan. With the combined strength of Mimecast’s targeted set of solutions and Microsoft’s cloud platform, organisations now have the ability to choose services from more than one vendor, spreading the risk and protecting both their data and end users. Mimecast’s new services for Office 365 are the last piece in the puzzle needed to enable enterprises to make the move to the cloud without further delay.”

Mimecast’s Office 365 services offer a complete continuity platform for Microsoft Office 365, delivered from the Mimecast Cloud. The service delivers email to end users during planned or unplanned outages of any part of their email infrastructure, including Office 365, which the company sees as a key business continuity and disaster recovery planning consideration.

It also provides a multifaceted Secure Email Gateway that overlays Office 365 and Exchange Online Protection to give customers a blended cloud security solution. This multi-layered, blended cloud approach to security includes Mimecast’s anti-spear-phishing Targeted Threat Protection offering, and supports comprehensive protection in a constantly changing threat landscape.

An independent, immutable perpetual archive of all email to Mimecast’s cloud archive is provided for added data resilience and backup purposes. Content can be rapidly accessed by end users and eDiscovery workers for improved productivity and to satisfy eDiscovery requirements.

It also has a Legacy Archive Data Management for Office 365, which allows historical email archive content to be rapidly ingested into the Mimecast Archive, and be easily accessible to support improved productivity, eDiscovery and compliance needs. It helps remove the cost and complexity of managing legacy on-premise archives.

Federated Enterprise Services for Office 365 provide unified policy administration and control across complex environments. This supports hierarchical policy inheritance, unified administration logon and discovery, and archive isolation of view requirements.