We have been living with Mimecast for around three months now so I thought it was about time I wrote something about our experiences which, to be honest, have been very good. If you are unfamiliar with Mimecast they provide an online service based unified email management, archiving and security solution.

Prior to moving to an online provider I struggled for quite some time with the notion of trusting our email security and archiving to an online partner but a number of factors came together to drive the decision home, some of these factors included:

• Increasing software licensing requirements on existing applications
• Regular downtime due to the need to install patches and upgrades on existing applications
• Differing platforms which do not play together too well
• Storage capabilities onsite are limited
• Speed of access
• Limited availability of people resources on our site
• The need to provide resilience in case of systems failure

Combining the applications of e-mail security, management and archiving into a single unified platform is still somewhat in its infancy. Different products, from different vendors, do not play entirely happily together, and then we have the various licensing schemes (try and figure out Microsoft Forefront licensing) and the requirements to provide some resilience and backup in case of failure and the cost and time soon add up. All of these factors made me rethink my reluctance to move these services to an online partner.

Once the selection of vendor was complete (you can see a list of potential vendors we looked at in this article: Bolstering Email Services – What Are The Options?) the next stage of implementation was surprisingly organised and gladly painless. We were up and running with the Mimecast platform very quickly, there are a number of steps involved to migrate and I have written more detail about it in my blog over at the Computing website. I also attended an administrator training day to spend some time away from the office focusing on the administrative features of the platform – this is well worth the time involved and I came away with a clearer picture of what we could do and what we could not do with the platform. I also have a much better understanding of how the content policy section of the smart perimeter works – it is quite straightforward but sometimes it is much easier if you can just see someone doing it.

One of the options we went for with the plan was mail archiving, or message warehousing as Mimecast call it, and this required figuring out how to get the data out of our existing system into Mimecast. Now, I have finally managed to extract the data out of our GFI Mail Archiver solution into a format which can be ingested into the mail archiving aspect of the platform. The amount of time this task requires should not be underestimated, it is time consuming, laborious and tricky – but was it ever really going to be straightforward? At least that stage is almost behind us and we can start gaining the benefits of the online platform.

As I wrote part of this article our electrical power was off, and as a result so was our email server, due to an electrical upgrade. However, I could still access my electronic mail through the Mimecast website – I could not have achieved this without an online service provider – and neither could our field based staff. I am also looking at the Outlook plug-in to tie in the message archiving service into the familiar Outlook client.

Now, my mornings are spent on the Hold Review Queue section of the Mimecast platform (which is accessed from a web browser), looking at any peculiar emails which may need addressing. A handy feature on the hold review queue is the ability to right click on a message and select release, permit sender, block sender, and several other options. The permit sender options allows us to create a list of authorised senders, for example trading partners, whom we trust. The block sender option allows us to keep those unsolicited communications down to a minimum. One thing jumps to mind – it would save some time if the block sender option did not keep throwing up a dialog box telling me “Sender has been added to the block list” – but I can live with it – it is certainly a lot less clicks than was required under the previous solution.