Former US Transportation Department CIO Nitin Pradhan discusses how one can upgrade Microsoft enterprise email using a unified email management system.
As a CIO, when what you are promoting email system goes down and brings your company to a halt, you immediately become the main favourite individual on the planet — in keeping with Edward Snowden. i do know . i have been there after I was CIO for the united states Department of Transportation.
Microsoft’s software — Exchange and its new cloud incarnation, Office 365 — is the most excellent for intra- and inter-enterprise communications. It’s one of the vital critical systems any organization has, yet few CIOs treat it as such before a calamity happens. I’ve hit upon an easy strategy to address critical concerns linked to Microsoft enterprise email systems.
As business requirements have changed over the years, organizations have needed to add peripheral software to support their core email system. That software features a range of security, backup, archiving, e-discovery, and huge-file sending products.
Those additions have ended in interdependent, interconnected systems which might be costly and complicated to preserve. Additionally, IT administrators must consider the challenges of BYOD and cloud software, infrastructure, and platform services.
[How can IT innovators help government agencies? Read Making a Market for Public-Private Innovations.]
Organizations must design their next-generation email systems with those challenges in mind. Ideally, CIOs wish to use a single product, whereby IT administrators can manage all of those email management services in addition to their organization’s security, continuity, and archiving policies from a safe, scalable online platform. Is there this type of product?
I discovered any such product — Mimecast — after leaving the Transportation Department and co-founding GOVonomy, where I took at the challenge of establishing our next-gen email system at the Exchange/Office 365 core. There are similar competing products from Proofpoint, Symantec, and McAfee.
Mimecast has greater than 500 employees and seven,000 customers. Its singular focus is removing the complexity and stress from email system management. It has created its own category of goods under the umbrella of unified email management (UEM), including:
Email security
Mimecast gateway services scan all inbound and outbound email, performing encryption, data leak prevention, large-file sending, and other functions.
Email archiving
With Mimecast’s bottomless cloud archive, accessible directly from Outlook, Exchange administrators now not must impose mailbox limits. They could set policies to figure out how long specific information is stored, streamline the quest process during a discovery request, and make sure that important information is usually nearby.
Mimecast’s gateway service is exclusive within the way it captures data. It is the point of entry, accepting email on behalf of its customers, and the purpose of exit, delivering email on behalf of its customers. Email is captured and archived at these points, in real-time.
This setup lets the archive capture not just the quality email data, but additionally the wealthy transactional meta data (proof-of-delivery and proof-of-receipt information, in addition to all of the policies applied). All of this data is held in an encrypted, tamper-proof data store, giving customers a litigation-ready archive.
Email continuity
Should your Exchange system go down — whether it is a planned or unplanned outage — Mimecast continues to just accept and deliver email, either directly through Outlook, through a Webmail client, or via mobile applications. Mimecast also provides email continuity on each of the major mobile platforms: iOS, Android, Windows, and BlackBerry.
File archiving
Mimecast’s cloud-based file archiving solution brings vast amounts of knowledge together into an instantly accessible, compliant archive. With many other offerings, organizations are faced with having data distributed across multiple systems, on multiple sites, and stored both within the cloud and on-premises.
Mimecast continually synchronizes data from the customer’s on-premises servers, keeping stored versions consistent and arranged. This approach lets Mimecast bring disparate data together in a single secure archive that’s simple to regulate, easy to go looking, and available to a whole organization.
Integrating Mimecast
Mimecast systems, that are operational within days, typically replace multiple systems — sometimes as much as eight to ten of them. Consolidating systems can reduce maintenance, upgrade, and operational costs, while improving security and functionality.
Mimecast price performance
Forrester Research estimates that Mimecast UEM pays for itself in three hundred and sixty five days and delivers 102% ROI in only three years.
Brian Attas, CIO of the Environmental Defense Fund, told Mimecast: “Our evaluation showed that the TCO for Mimecast will be lower than half that of an in-house email system — primarily for the reason that extra features in Mimecast enabled us to eliminate six servers and associated software licenses, including two Exchange servers. That sealed the deal for us.”
Jerry Hook, manager of Windows systems on the University of Tennessee Medical Center, in an organization case study, similarly said: “Overall, we estimate that UT Medical Center saved 60% on IT costs with unified email management.”
What else can Mimecast improve?
Mimecast users wish to archive and share more in their own local data, not only file shares which are already at the network, but data they’ve locally with both internal and external users, with no need to revert to shadow IT services like Dropbox. By having one of these feature and putting the users on top of things, IT administrators will reduce expensive network file shares, increase accessibility of knowledge, and decrease the chance for data leaks.
Nitin Pradhan is a former CIO of america Dept. of Transportation, founding father of Public Private Innovations, and co-founding father of GOVonomy, a firm that identifies, assesses, and introduces innovative technology services and products for the general public sector. GOVonomy doesn’t put money into companies whose products Pradhan writes about, however invites companies to submit their innovative products/services for consideration for GOVonomy and future columns.
Moving email to the cloud has lowered IT costs and improved efficiency. Discover what federal agencies can learn from early adopters. Also within the The good Email Migration issue of InformationWeek Government: Lessons from a successful government data site. (Free registration required.)
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