EMAIL IS PART OF our daily lives and, for many of us, being unable to access it results in something resembling paralysis as we desperately tap the “send and receive” button in the hope of resolving the situation. Delivering email services to companies with thousands of users by using a service hosted on the Internet is the challenge that unified email-management vendor Mimecast has taken up.<\/p>\n
In order to achieve that it’s using one of the currently hot technology trends known as software as a service (SaaS). That entails buying access to a service without having to invest in any actual software or hardware. Instead, you simply connect to a system that could be hosted anywhere on the Internet.<\/p>\n
Mimecast South Africa MD Garth Wittles says unified email management is one of the areas that lend themselves to the concept of SaaS. That’s because much of the email received by any company either arrives from outside or is sent to an external contact. That means mail is already traversing the Internet, and to re-route it via a central system that archives the mail – and removes any infected mails or spam, while enforcing corporate email policy – is relatively simple to implement.<\/p>\n
Wittles says because email is a standardised service with almost no peculiarities between various companies, apart from the length of time they want mail to be archived and other minor configuration changes, a SaaS model makes sense.<\/p>\n
There are a few concerns about SaaS, in particular relating to its security. That’s because the nature of an SaaS service means you have multiple companies sharing the same physical infrastructure. Wittles says ensuring only properly authorised people have access to the system and that nobody’s mail is compromised is something Mimecast takes very seriously. He adds it would take only one breach to discredit the Mimecast business model, and that’s why every precaution is taken.<\/p>\n