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Looking Closer At Email Security, Contingency and Archiving Services
Tuesday, 3 February 2009
5 CommentsWe are back to looking at ways of enhancing our email infrastructure – see Bolstering Email Services – What Are The Options?. My supplier is still waiting on a price from Webroot so in the meantime I have spent some time looking at Mimecast which recently included a WebEx demonstration. I have also been taking a look at MessageStream and Postini.
One niggle when investigating new services is lack of clarity about what is on offer and what it costs.
When I ask for a price for a service I always ask if there are any other charges I may need to know about, that I may be currently unaware of. Obviously one expects the service charge, and the annual support charge but often there may be an additional one off setup charge.
Whilst looking into these particular services I recently heard there is an optional data ingestion charge (to get your old archived information into the service) for one of the providers. I have been somewhat surprised at the cost of the ingestion service which, in our scenario, adds around 50% to the upfront price. Another recent “optional service” on another service is an additional cost for internal email archiving (user to user) rather than incoming or outgoing mail – this sort of thing can add a huge amount to the price.
We have set down a number of things we aim to achieve with the adoption of an email support service, the things on our shopping list are:
- Store and forward mail service
- User managed spam filter, multiple anti-virus, and other malware protection services (including content filter, blacklist check)
- Multiple domain name support
- Multiple user email address aliases
- End user access to email when our email server is unavailable
- Alerting service (when the link to our mail server is broken)
- Email server synchronisation (when our email server comes back online)
- Remote email access (to complement or possible replace OWA)
- 10 years mail archive with search and recover facility
- Internal mail archiving
- End user access to individual archive
- Email backup
- Bulk archive retrieval (i.e. if changing service provider)
- Outlook client plug-in – if available
- Mobile push support (Exchange 2007)
- Ongoing support
Jason Slater is an independent technologist and blogger.
Jason,
Have you considered forgoing the physical infrastructure all together? Combine Google Apps Premier Edition and Google Message Discovery, and you have an email server that meets your needs. As a hosted solution, some of your requirements become moot.
Regards,
Allen
@Allen
You raise a good point but I think a lot of people are choosing to still retain local infrastructure for message delivery. Just look at the results of last month’s Forrester Research’s report “Rethinking Where Your Email Lives And Who’s Managing It” – 56% of respondents wanted a hybrid of on-premise server and in the cloud services, only 19% wanted to outsource their entire e-mail service and a mere 14% wanted to keep everything in-house.
This has driven us at Mimecast to work very heavily being a Software-as-a-Service vendor with tight integration with on-premise technologies like Active Directory, Exchange and Outlook. You get the benefits of cloud computing with the ability to leverage existing investments in local infrastructure.
The analogy I always use is like we’re a utility company. Hardly any company these days applies for a water extraction licence, drills a borehole, pumps the water out, pipes it across the country, builds a reservoir to handle peaks in demand, then filters and cleans the water before using it – it just isn’t that company’s core business (unless they are a water utility!). Instead they choose to purchase the water from a utility company whose core business is to do these functions and therefore offers economies of scale and specific expertise.
The local mail server is like the tap within the customer’s premises – it is the method of delivery. Utility companies don’t mess with their customer’s internal plumbing!
Besides, software like Exchange offers much more functionality than just email services. These other services (for instance tasks, address book, calendar) have yet to be fully and seamlessly provided by a cloud vendor using Outlook as a client – but I think many of us are currently working on it.
James
Good analogy James and something that even non-techies can understand, and thanks for highlighting about the other functions of Exchange – I haven’t yet fully considered those especially the calendar function.
Jason If you have not heard of Arcmail Defender before it is worth checking out.
* Store and forward mail service – yes
* User managed spam filter, multiple anti-virus, and other malware protection services (including content filter, blacklist check)- no but mail server should already do this
* Multiple domain name support – yes
* Multiple user email address aliases – yes
* End user access to email when our email server is unavailable – Yes
* Alerting service (when the link to our mail server is broken)- Yes
* Email server synchronisation (when our email server comes back online)- Yes
* Remote email access (to complement or possible replace OWA)- remote web browser access from anywhere, and through outlook.
* 10 years mail archive with search and recover facility – Set retention period as long as you want, one button recover!
* Internal mail archiving – Yes, internal, outbound and inbound
* End user access to individual archive – Yes, Administrator, Configure, Manager, and End user access to only their specific emails
* Email backup – Yes, Hot swappable discs for extra backup
* Bulk archive retrieval (i.e. if changing service provider)- Yes, Single or bulk email restore, and its one button to restore!
* Outlook client plug-in – if available – Yes, creates folder in outlook to access search functions
* Mobile push support (Exchange 2007)- Yes
* Ongoing support – Yes , manufacturer support and reseller
Arcmail Defender meets all your needs except for the anti-virus , spam-filter, which a basic network firewall solves. If you want to learn more email me at mgilbert@saytek.com I am an authorized reseller of this product. Arcmail website is http://www.arcmail.com
Thanks for the list of requirements Jason. It’s a good checklist for us to use on our new service.