Are Firms Finally Moving Email to the Cloud?

The reports of email’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. For all the social media platform, unified communications offerings and other ways that people can communicate in 2015, email is still one of the most used and most basic.

“If you turn off access to email, in most organizations that's more catastrophic than turning off the phone system,” noted Mounil Patel in a recent TMCnet video interview, vice president of strategic field engagement for Mimecast. “Email is not dead yet."

Email is not dead by a longshot.

It is changing, however, and the evolution is unsurprisingly toward the cloud; hosted corporate email has been slower to move to the cloud than consumer email (who doesn’t have a Gmail account in 2015?). But organizations are starting to realize that keeping a tight reign on corporate email is no smarter than keeping CRM in-house and avoiding solutions such as Saleforce.com.

Part of the reason for the migration to the cloud is because email is basically a commodity. Email is a utility, and most businesses use it in similar ways not unlike electricity.

This gives companies such as Mimecast an opportunity.

"We take long-term email storage off the corporate server in a cost-effective way," Patel told us. "We do pretty much anything you can think of in terms of email services, including security, content control and email archiving."

The company does look to make their cloud-based email service something more than just a commodity, however; Mimecast offers continuity features that keep email flowing without expensive redundancy in terms of data centers and infrastructure.

It also puts great stress on security, since email both can be a gateway on the corporate network for malware, and also because companies are rightly aware that much sensitive information comes across through email.

"Spear-phishing attacks are the new big thing people should be worried about in the email security space,” he noted. “All it takes is one person to clicking on a malicious link to compromise a company. You need to put technologies in place that assume the worst is going to happen and protect against or mitigate that risk."—Technologies that Mimecast offers.

Businesses won’t move their email to third-party providers unless there’s a compelling value proposition, and security and cost-effectiveness certainly qualify as compelling value.