With the introduction of Microsoft Exchange 2010 you may be evaluating your current
email infrastructure and considering what makes sense for you moving forward. A recent
survey by Forrester
1found that a hybrid solution of in-the-cloud and on-premise email
infrastructure was the preferred option for the majority of organizations considering such
changes – and there is good reason for this. This document examines in detail how the
combination of Microsoft Exchange 2010 on-premise and Mimecast’s Software-as-a-Service
(SaaS) in-the-cloud can be the perfect solution for your organization’s short, medium and
long term email strategy.
MIMECAST & MICROSOFT EXCHANGE SERVER
This document begins by examining the benefi ts that Microsoft Exchange 2010
can bring to your organizati on’s end users and administrators and then considers
the specifi c advantages that Mimecast can off er you over other SaaS soluti ons.
Subsequent pages look at how a hybrid soluti on of Microsoft Exchange 2010
on-premise together with Mimecast in the cloud can deliver superior email
security, conti nuity and archiving capability. It then off ers suggesti ons on what
to consider when planning your migrati on to Microsoft Exchange 2010 and how
the associated risks can be reduced by deploying Mimecast prior to your upgrade
to ensure 100% email conti nuity throughout the process. Finally, it summarizes
the immediate and long term benefi ts that a hybrid soluti on of Microsoft and
Mimecast can bring to your organizati on.
CUSTOMER
INFRASTRUCTURE
USER ACCESS
Email Archiving & Search Email Continuity Compliance & eDiscovery Email Encryption Data Loss Prevention Anti-virus & Anti-spam Mimecast Services
for Exchange ExchangeServer
EMAIL SERVER – Why Exchange 2010 on-premise
best meets your needs
Email servers lie at the core of many business applications and processes, and retaining flexibility for custom integration of these systems is a key requirement for IT managers. Also, there are certain parts of your infrastructure which are particularly latency sensitive (such as the BlackBerry Enterprise Server) and require close physical proximity to your email server. For these reasons it invariably makes sense to host your Exchange servers in your own data centers.
Save time and lower costs by reducing
the burden on IT staff with improved
administration features
A new role-based security model, self-service capabilities, and the new Exchange Control panel introduced with Exchange 2010, allow tasks to be delegated to users without providing them with full administrative rights. Role-based access control enables specialized roles for unified Messaging managers, help desk staff and Exchange administrators to be created to simplify administration and delegate tasks to the appropriate staff for increased productivity.
Increased end user productivity from
enhanced inbox management tools
Maintaining your own email servers is not a trivial task. Storage and records management problems are a real issue and the additional space required in your data centers, the energy needed to run the servers and the knowledgeable staff required to install and maintain them pose a real drain on resources. This is why reducing the cost and complexity of delivering your wider email supporting services such as email security, continuity and archiving makes sense. This is where Mimecast can help by delivering those elements as a SaaS solution, leaving you to focus on your core email infrastructure. Mimecast is a unified Software-as-a-Service email management solution which includes comprehensive email security, continuity and archiving services, plus email branding and marketing capability, and was designed and built from its inception with this unified service as its goal.
However, many email SaaS solutions were initially designed as either a security solution or an online archive or to provide email continuity. These services have subsequently been extended, often by integrating third party solutions, in an effort to deliver an email management solution similar in breadth to Mimecast. The result is that performance can be impaired as emails and policies need to be manually replicated across many separate systems. Another consequence of such disparate architectures is that the various components of the solution are not fully integrated. For instance, whilst you might be able to continue sending and receiving emails during a local server outage, you may not necessarily have access to your entire email archive or your emails may not be subject to your standard security and archiving rules.
because Mimecast was built from the ground up as a unified email management solution there is complete integration between all areas of the service ensuring consistent protection at all times. Issues of corporate governance, risk mitigation and regulatory and legislative compliance have shaped the design of the Mimecast service ensuring that email is stored securely and strong chains of custody are maintained so that your data is tamper proof, auditable and secure to deliver evidential quality data if required. Without this fully unified architecture chains of custody may not be maintained throughout the life cycle of the email, and because security is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, using third party solutions may compromise the overall security of your data.
Another goal of the service has been to ensure tight integration with Microsoft Exchange and Outlook to deliver maximum value to organizations who have already invested heavily in this technology. Mimecast tightly integrates with your existing Microsoft Exchange servers giving end users seamless email continuity with access to historical email directly from their familiar Outlook mailbox.
Mimecast’s proprietary, purpose built grid architecture was built with performance and resilience in mind. A parallel computing grid, similar to that used by Internet search engines, delivers sub-second search times. Inbuilt resilience and geographically diverse data centres ensure that the Mimecast service is always available from the cloud, reducing risk to your organization and minimizing cost and complexity, while providing total end-to-end control of email.
THE MIMECAST UNIFIED EMAIL
Email is a critical business tool, but it also represents a significant risk to your organization. Malware, phishing and spam threats are constantly evolving and sensitive information can fall prey to accidental or malicious data leaks or to interception if not transmitted securely. Organizations typically build up a set of multiple point solutions to address these threats, but these are costly and complex to maintain. An ideal solution would be to replace this disparate collection of hardware and software with a single, ready-to-use, SLA-backed, centrally managed solution delivered from the cloud, reducing cost and freeing IT staff to focus on core business needs.
Mimecast – Robust, unified email
security solution delivered from
the cloud
Achieving robust security capability within the basic Exchange product is often extremely complex and costly to deploy and maintain, diverting valuable IT resources away from core business activities and using up precious server room space. Organizations often have to deploy and maintain a disparate set of software and hardware solutions on-premise, including spam and virus filters, gateway content policy enforcement and email encryption solutions. The array of applications required to deliver comprehensive email security on-premise can be easily replaced by connecting to the Mimecast service. With a highly sophisticated solution using multiple best of breed virus and spam scanners combined with proprietary heuristic technology for detecting zero-hour threats and backed by SlAs of 100% availability, 100% virus protection and 98% spam prevention, you can be confident that Mimecast will deliver the protection you need. Managing information sent via email is also an essential part of an organization’s information security strategy. Mimecast’s flexible and granular policy administration lets you accurately reflect your organization’s email security policy, identifying emails containing sensitive information and taking appropriate action to control distribution. Messages identified by your policy as containing sensitive information can be automatically encrypted via TlS, securing the information against interception. Where the
email connection does not support TlS, secure delivery is available via Mimecast Closed Circuit Messaging (CCM), a proprietary solution enabling the delivery of email content via a secure web-based channel that offers tamper-proof, secure mail delivery with non-repudiation. Mimecast Enhanced Stationery also ensures that legal notices, signatures and branding are used correctly and provides flexible policies to accurately target marketing messages. This rich set of security and email stationery features can be rapidly provisioned without the need to deploy and maintain any on-premise hardware or software. Spam and viruses are eliminated before they reach your organization, reducing the load on your network, improving performance and reducing infrastructure costs. Centralized management from the unified Mimecast web-based console reduces the administration load, saving costs and freeing up IT resources.
Today email is much more than just a messaging solution, it is used to send, receive, and store essential business documents and forms a critical audit trail in every organization’s core business processes. Protecting the uptime of email systems and email data access is therefore a key responsibility of IT professionals but implementing the necessary resilient and redundant infrastructure on-premise is costly to deploy and maintain, requires skilled IT staff available 24x7, and takes up valuable space in server rooms. Therefore organizations need an alternative solution which meets their continuity needs without the significant capital outlay and drain on IT resources associated with on-premise solutions.
Mimecast – Rapid and cost effective
deployment of email continuity backed
by a 100% SLA
The new Exchange 2010 architecture supports improved high-availability capability through the possibility of continuous data replication across multiple servers on geographically dispersed sites across your network. If an error occurs with the ‘master database’ the mail server is automatically switched to a working copy on another server, potentially in another physical location. However, such deployments require the planning and purchase of additional hardware and software, take up precious rack space in over-crowded server rooms and perhaps most significantly, require the necessary IT skills to deploy and manage such complex infrastructure. All this involves additional capital expenditure and ongoing operational cost and is far from quick to deploy, resulting in a slow return on investment. Without such a dispersed network of servers this on-premise solution suffers from a fundamental flaw. It sits on the “wrong” side of the firewall and consequently if Internet connectivity is lost to the building, the continuity solution will fail.
The Mimecast SaaS solution delivers 100% SlA-backed availability without the need to purchase and maintain any additional hardware or software, freeing up highly skilled IT staff to focus on core business needs and taking the strain off your crowded data centers. Mimecast’s SaaS solution can be rapidly provisioned, delivering a comprehensive continuity service for email access, security, policy enforcement and archiving at a predictable cost, ensuring a rapid return on investment.
during an Exchange outage or network failure, the Mimecast service automatically delivers email directly to end users via their Outlook mailbox giving them seamless access to new email. users also continue to have uninterrupted access to their Mimecast personal archive from Outlook, giving them access to all of their historical email. Once Exchange is back up and running, all queued email and any new email created during the outage, is delivered to the mail server. This entire failover and failback process occurs without the need for any intervention from administrators or end users.
Email is today’s primary business communication tool. It forms binding contracts with your customers, suppliers and employees; it records negotiations, purchase orders and customer commitments. Consequently the risks of possible legal or regulatory sanctions posed by an inadequate email archiving solution can be severe, ranging from financial penalties to legal sanctions. An effective email archiving solution must create a complete record of all internal and external email communication, allow effective litigation holds to be applied, support eDiscovery requirements and provide evidential quality data should it be required for legal or regulatory purposes and be able to scale easily to meet future needs.
Mimecast – Immediate and scalable
archiving solution that addresses
legislative and compliance needs
While Exchange 2010 now offers integrated archiving capability this may not meet the needs of many organizations3. In particular, Exchange 2010 does not meet basic legal and regulatory compliance needs as it has no mechanism to validate data integrity or chains of custody, leaving organizations at increased risk of regulatory and legal sanctions should they need to provide emails as evidence. There is no facility to search for specific emails to place on hold or even place holds on emails from within a given time period. litigation holds can only be provided by stopping the destruction of email from an entire mailbox. This lack of granularity means that in practice senior management are likely to have their mailboxes placed on permanent hold, causing unnecessary volumes of email to be retained and possibly leading to over disclosure of information which could be detrimental to legal cases.
A feature of the Microsoft Exchange 2010 personal archive is that it is tied to the user’s active account, and therefore to Active directory. Consequently when a user leaves an organization and their mailboxes are deleted, so is their archive. In order to preserve the email data, administrators must export the archive from Exchange which brings with it complications of where to store those emails for ediscovery purposes as well as raising potential chain of custody issues.
To achieve a highly-available archive, complex and costly multi-site deployments are required with significant ongoing support needs and capacity planning requirements. Also, Exchange personal archives will not be available to all end users from their Microsoft Outlook client as this functionality requires Outlook 2010 to be deployed, which for many organizations may not be deployed for some considerable time and will result in significant additional expense.
Mimecast seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook to deliver a ready-to-use, centrally managed archiving solution, enhancing user productivity and enabling organizations to meet legislative and regulatory compliance needs. Messages stored within Mimecast are tamper proof, and strong chains of custody are maintained through the entire lifecycle of the email, to provide evidential quality data should it be required for legal or regulatory purposes.
Mimecast’s SaaS solution offers significant deployment benefits over any on-premise email archive. It can be rapidly provisioned to deliver immediate email archiving capability with zero capital outlay and without the need to maintain any additional hardware or software. End users have immediate and direct access to their personal archive from within their existing Outlook clients.
The topology of the Mimecast solution also brings with it another significant advantage over any on-premise archiving solution. Emails are often subject to perimeter hygiene and connection management services which may result in emails being amended or even blocked at the Internet gateway. because on-premise archiving solutions record emails as they leave the email server, rather than when they leave your network, the archived email may not be a true reflection of the email that was actually transmitted. because Mimecast archives emails after all processing has been completed, you can be sure that the archived email is representative of what was actually sent to the recipient, ensuring evidential quality data.
Having evaluated Exchange 2010 you may want to take advantage of its new end user and administrator productivity features. However, you may find that this alone will not meet your continuity and archiving needs due to limitations in its compliance functionality and the cost and complexity of deploying resilient server architecture. You may also be looking to reduce the cost of deploying and maintaining additional email security solutions such as anti-spam,
anti-virus, dlp and email encryption on your own network. This is where a hybrid solution of Exchange on-premise and Mimecast in the cloud can best address your needs. deploying Mimecast prior to your Exchange 2010 migration also means that you can perform the upgrade, confident in the knowledge that users will have uninterrupted access to email during the process as Mimecast will deliver 100% email availability throughout.
Microsoft Exchange
2010 on-premise
plus Mimecast
• Improved end-user and administrative features from Exchange 2010 • unified email security,
continuity and archiving SaaS solution managed by Mimecast 24x7 and backed by 100% availability SlA • Mimecast security SlA of
100% virus protection and 98% spam prevention • Secure, resilient, infinitely
scalable archiving infrastructure
• Email archive to fully address email compliance needs • No complex infrastructure
to buy, build and maintain for ancillary email services • Reduced Exchange backup
and restore times • Email continuity to support
future Exchange migrations
Microsoft Exchange
2003/2007 on-premise
plus Mimecast
• Zero risk migration to Exchange 2010 with continuous email access from Mimecast • unified email security,
continuity and archiving SaaS solution managed by Mimecast 24x7 and backed by 100% availability SlA • Mimecast security SlA of
100% virus protection and 98% spam prevention • Secure, resilient, infinitely
scalable archiving infrastructure
• Email archive to fully address email compliance needs • No complex infrastructure
to buy, build and maintain for ancillary email services • Reduced Exchange backup
and restore times
Microsoft Exchange
2003/2007 on-premise
• Market leading email server • Integration with Microsoft
communication and collaboration tools • Custom integration with
other key business applications • No integrated security or dlp capability • No integrated email continuity • No integrated archiving capability
longer term considerations should also be kept in mind when considering your email strategy. Mimecast’s scalable architecture enables IT departments to respond rapidly to both organic growth and unexpected step changes in size which can result from, for instance, company acquisitions. A consequence of this can be that IT departments not only have to quickly scale their infrastructure but also have to manage mixed email server environments. Mimecast can deliver a single, unified solution for email
security, continuity and archiving even across mixed server environments by building on existing email server infrastructure.
decoupling the email archive from the underlying email server has the benefit of reducing Exchange backup and restore times, simplifying future server upgrades and migrations and supporting flexibility of choice for future email infrastructure decisions.
• Reduce cost and complexity by eliminating the need to deploy and maintain multiple email supporting services
Offloading the burdensome task of maintaining email services such as anti-virus, anti-spam, dlp, encryption, email stationery management (branding, disclaimers, signatures), continuity and archiving on-premise significantly reduces cost, helps meet environmental targets and frees up IT resources to focus on core business needs. • Retain flexibility and control through custom
integration of on-premise Exchange with other business applications
Keeping Exchange on-premise enables custom integration with other communication solutions and key business applications, such as your CRM and financial systems that require close integration with mail servers and directories. • Completely remove the risk of email
downtime during Exchange migrations and scheduled outages
With Mimecast in place, you can perform your upgrade to Exchange 2010 confidently, knowing that users will have uninterrupted
• Immediate, secure and scalable archiving solution to meet both end-user and compliance needs
Mimecast gives end users immediate and seamless access to their personal archive from within their existing Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007 clients and provides comprehensive ediscovery case management tools to meet legislative and regulatory compliance needs. • Reduce risk by accessing 100% SLA-backed
availability for email security, DLP, continuity and archiving services
Secure, resilient, scalable infrastructure supported 24x7 by Mimecast at a lower cost than an on-premise solution. • Uncompromising security from a fully
unified email solution
built from its inception as a fully unified email security, continuity and archiving solution, Mimecast does not use any third party providers to process your email, ensuring that email security and chains of custody are not compromised.
SUMMARY OF BENEFITS – Mimecast and
Microsoft Exchange 2010
Mimecast delivers Software-as-a-Service based enterprise email management including security, continuity and archiving. by unifying disparate and fragmented email environments into one holistic solution that is always available from the cloud, Mimecast minimizes risk and reduces cost and complexity, while providing total end-to-end control of email.
ABOUT MIMECAST
• Archiving solution architecture designedto provide evidential quality data because Mimecast archives emails after all
processing has been completed you can be sure that they are a true representation of what was actually sent to the recipient, ensuring evidential quality data.
• Better utilise existing hardware, improve network performance and reduce the load on your email servers
Mimecast removes unwanted and harmful email before it reaches your network, reducing both bandwidth requirements and the load on your Exchange servers for better performance and reduced cost.
• Save time by reducing the burden of finding and retaining multi-skilled email
administration staff
Address the ongoing challenge of finding and retaining knowledgeable IT staff by placing the maintenance of ancillary email infrastructure in the hands of Mimecast staff focussed on delivering these services to the highest standards.
• Future proof your investment in Exchange, by obtaining the flexibility to adapt rapidly to future needs
Mimecast operates across mixed email environments allowing rapid integration and consistent email policy deployment, irrespective of the type of email server infrastructure. Mimecast also supports freedom of choice for future mail server decisions by keeping your archived data independent of your mail server.
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