Business Continuity
Reduce the complexity of managing e-mail
A software-as-a-service platform can
ensure the availability, confidentiality and
integrity of stored data.
by James Blake
In
today’s enterprise, e-mail is a
mission-critical application, as well as a
major source of risk, complexity and
expense. While e-mail is embedded in many of
the workflows needed to keep orders coming
in and goods or services flowing out, e-mail
also introduces a series of risks to an
organization–outages, malware infections,
phishing and data leaks, as well as the
burden of retaining and archiving all
e-mail, because it may be required for
litigation or regulatory compliance.
Organizations often limit many of these
risks by augmenting their e-mail servers
with a variety of different platforms over
time, each to tackle a particular risk. The
result is often a fragmented architecture
with no central point of policy
configuration or reporting. This structure
also causes fragmented reporting, with each
solution reporting on its own subset of
risk.
A software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution
can reduce the cost of handling e-mail,
minimize the risks, increase performance and
reduce complexity. Intrinsic to this
solution is ensuring the confidentiality and
integrity of data stored on the platform,
while providing multiple levels of
redundancy to make certain that stored data
remains available.
The SaaS platform also can provide
mitigation against risk and enforcement of
corporate policies. The services platform is
configured from a single central policy
interface that aligns with IT policies.
Reporting is centralized, providing one
portal to understand exactly what threats
are being addressed and what trends are
analyzed to establish baselines and track
progress. Constant policy enforcement and
improved reporting also ensure that
compliance to both policies and regulations
can be audited.
Policy enforcement and risk mitigation
can be coupled with the existing
infrastructure, such as Microsoft Exchange
mail servers and Microsoft Active Directory
directories. Through this coupling, the
barrier to entry is reduced and full service
is provided from the moment of deployment.
E-mail policy and security features provide
granular policy-based enforcement of
disclaimer, attachment, branding and
acceptable use policies. In addition, e-mail
security features a variety of techniques to
ensure protection against spam, malware,
phishing and leaks of sensitive internal
data.
Retention and discovery services make
certain that all e-mail and associated
metadata are stored in a manner that ensures
strong chains of custody. When e-mails are
later presented as evidence in an internal
disciplinary or legal action, the evidential
quality can be proven. Additionally, the
storage platform can keep a copy of each
recipient’s e-mail within the organization,
as well as a copy of the original e-mail,
before any inbound policies are applied. All
transactional metadata also is copied, along
with the sending server and details of all
policy actions taken on the e-mail.
Discovery typically takes only a few
seconds, even against decades worth of data.
The SaaS platform also supports role-based
access control, allowing staff handling
compliance to search the entire archive, or
allow for searches of only the metadata.
Since the SaaS platform is outside the
enterprise, with no on-premise technical
components to manage, IT administrators do
not need to worry about how it is built or
how to manage the component parts, configure
encryption or high-availability clustering..
With the SaaS solution, services for
Microsoft Outlook allow users to continue to
receive and send e-mail, even if the
Exchange server is down for scheduled
maintenance or has suffered an outage. Once
the Exchange server is back online, e-mail
that has been sent and received is
resynchronized and normal service resumes.
Users can conduct searches against their own
e-mail contained within the archive and can
drag and drop e-mails from the archive back
into their inbox or other folder for
self-recovery.
James Blake is the chief product
strategist for Mimecast, Newton,
Mass.
For more information
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