A cloud-based email security, continuity, policy control and archiving service from Mimecast is now being offered in the Australian market by DocsCorp, developer of the pdfDocs productivity suite.

Shane Barnett, Product Management Director at DocsCorp, says, “It was a natural extension for a company that specialises in products that complement document management to bring in Mimecast’s cloud-based email management service.

“We have witnessed many of our users in the legal and corporate market using their email inbox as their de facto document repository. In one particular case, an individual had an Outlook Inbox that weighed in at 20GB!”

The Mimecast service does not look to replace a mail server, but instead provide all of the ancillary services that otherwise require separate point solutions, often from multiple vendors.

Mimecast provides email security, continuity and archiving as a SaaS offering, replacing the typical stack of email technologies; gateways, anti-spam systems, email archives, continuity facilities, email marketing, policy control and virus protection.

Mimecast plugs in as a cloud service connecting the organisation’s mail server to the world beyond.

Email archived or stored at Mimecast’s data centres is able to be accessed remotely via the Web, a mobile device or a Microsoft Outlook plug-in, and users have fast search tools to manage the entire archive. Mail is transferred to and from an organisation’s existing Exchange servers after being scanned for malware, spam and subjected to intelligent content monitoring.

Promising 99.999 per cent email uptime, Mimecast also doubles as an archiving system and a disaster recovery solution. It also offers security and attachment controls so that instead of delivering large files it can provide a link, thus lightening the load on an email server.

If an Exchange server goes down, a Mimecast user keeps working in their Outlook client as email is still sent and received via a https connection to the Cloud.

“An Exchange server is not just for email anymore,” said Barnett. “It’s at the core of so many other vital business processes, whether it’s a Blackberry server or document management system.”

In its home market in the UK, Mimecast has signed up 60% of the top legal firms there for its service.

Peter Bauer, founder and CEO of Mimecast, said, “According to the latest industry figures, email volume in organisations is growing by more than 30% per year and the average user now receives 7MB of data per day via email. Such rapid increases in storage requirements make on-premise storage and archiving an increasingly expensive and inefficient option and the most innovative law firms are turning to the cloud to deal with these issues.

“A cloud -computing solution, which reduces the cost and complexity of an organisation’s storage requirements, while improving functionality through instant search capability and automated compliance with industry regulations, can make a huge difference to an organisation. As businesses come under increasing pressure to retain all of their data and email communications in a safe and cost-effective manner, we expect adoption of cloud-based technologies to accelerate rapidly over the next 12 to 18 months.”