New Features Improve Monitoring, Alerting and Rapid Response

Mimecast Limited (NASDAQ: MIME), a leading email and data security company, announced enhancements to its Mailbox Continuity offering, designed to strengthen customers’ cyber resilience by automatically detecting a Microsoft® Exchange, Microsoft® Office 365™, or G Suite by Google Cloud email outage or disruption and enabling rapid mitigation. New Continuity Event Management features will reduce the time it takes for administrators to identify and respond to email disruptions by monitoring availability in real-time.

Unplanned email outages have significant impact to business operations. Outages can be the result of a variety of issues, such as: cloud service failure, power issues, hardware problems and network connectivity issues, among others. According to recent research from Mimecast conducted by Vanson Bourne, 88% of respondents rated email availability as critical to their organization, with more than half (55%) rating it as mission critical.

Mimecast’s new Continuity Event Management features monitor for high latency and failed deliveries, reducing the time it takes administrators to respond to mail flow issues. The system will alert administrators via SMS or an alternative email addresses and allows administrators to quickly respond to an incident. In the event of a disruption, Mimecast keeps email up and running for employees, enabling productivity, by emulating primary email systems, like Exchange and Office 365. Mimecast’s Outlook plug-in, mobile app and web portals provide ongoing access to email while the customer’s primary system access is being recovered independently. The new features will also include the ability to trigger SMS based alerts to all staff to let them know about an IT outage and share instructions as to what to do.

The recent Gartner report, Business Continuity Management Program Primer for 2017, published January 2017, stated:

“While large enterprises, especially those in regulated industries, may be better equipped to address the new demands for organizational resilience, small and midsize businesses will face the same threats, but can be constrained in terms of budget and resources. Nevertheless, the need for a proper BCM program persists. Businesses that fail to create an effective BCM program could risk catastrophic business disruptions, resulting in lost customer or citizen trust and customers switching to other providers.”

“Downtime affects many organizations and our recent research found that more than four in ten respondents suffered moderate to extensive disruption when their organization had an email outage.  Our own data shows that even in 2016, disruptions can be significant, with 11% of customer outages lasting over a day,” said David Hood, cyber resilience expert at Mimecast. “As more organizations move email to the cloud, planning for disruptions is an essential part of risk management. Mimecast’s new features allow organizations to strengthen their cyber resilience strategies by helping them quickly identify and respond to email disruptions from anywhere, and any device.”

The new features will be available in March 2017. For more information please visit the Mimecast Email Continuity page.