Mimecast Support for Business Productivity Online Standard Suite

Mimecast announced support for Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS), easing migration and extending the business benefits of Microsoft’s latest messaging and collaboration tools.

Mimecast’s services integrate with Microsoft’s hosted email platform, offering 100% service availability SLA and building on the benefits of BPOS by offering email archiving, as well as granular eDiscovery and legal hold capabilities. BPOS is Microsoft’s first email solution delivered entirely through a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, designed to give businesses an alternative to managing their email system in-house. This SaaS model aligns with Mimecast’s cloud-based services, already available for Microsoft’s on-premise solution, Exchange 2010.

"Momentum is building behind BPOS as businesses look to move applications to the cloud and run leaner IT departments," commented Peter Bauer, co-founder and CEO of Mimecast. "But the shift to a fully hosted email environment is a big jump, both culturally and technically, and IT teams are going to need to be sure they can migrate their data safely. It’s also important for organizations considering moving to BPOS to realize that there are choices available to them in terms of how they migrate, and in terms of specific areas of functionality where the standard BPOS offering can be enhanced. As a true SaaS vendor, Mimecast has seven years of experience in delivering services through the cloud, so we are particularly excited by the prospect of BPOS gaining traction in the market."

Laura DuBois, Program Vice President, IDC Storage Software and Solutions at IDC, said: "As we move into 2011, we see demand for third party cloud suppliers to offer services to complement the standard Microsoft BPOS functionality. With archiving in particular, businesses for whom eDiscovery is critical will want more powerful search tools for their users and more flexibility and control over how long they archive data. We would expect these companies to look to augment BPOS with third party solutions such as Mimecast, which already has a strong track record of providing this level of functionality for on-premise and hosted Exchange."

Benefits of Mimecast service for Microsoft BPOS:

• Eliminating risk during migration: For a business where email access is mission-critical even the shortest outage can be hugely damaging. Mimecast acts as a failsafe for users, providing a 100% availability SLA to keep businesses running at all times, through the migration and beyond
• Long-term independent email archive: Deployed in tandem with BPOS, Mimecast can provide an independent, long-term email archive offering bottomless and easily-searchable storage. Mimecast’s system stores all emails, including those deleted by users, for up to 10 years
• Advanced eDiscovery capabilities: The solution also offers granular eDiscovery and legal hold capability to help organisations meet their growing legal and compliance requirements. Mimecast’s archiving capability, combined with the system’s Outlook-integrated search tools, allows designated personnel to rapidly identify and retrieve evidential quality data in compliance with the legal restrictions