Cloud Computing & Bad Behaviour

In
Forrester’s latest report Rethinking
Where Your Email Lives And Who's Managing It, the following interesting
response appeared regarding email delivery methods:

This is
something that I’ve bought into for a long time and has shaped Mimecast’s
approach to Software-as-a-Service.  While ultimately the cloud will change
how we use our applications and where we store our data, many organizations
have large investments in on-premise applications and users have got used to
the client applications that they use day-in day-out.

With
regards to email management services specifically, I look at a service like
Mimecast’s as a utility, like that provided by a water company. 

A water
company undertakes a series of complex operations, it pumps water out of bore holes or
rivers, pumps it into a reservoir to manage peaks and troughs in supply, puts
the water through filtration and fluoridation and
eventually pumps it to the consumers premises.   Homeowners could choose to do this themselves: they could apply to the Environment Agency
for a water extraction licence, build a pumping and filtration works and a
storage facility – but why bother?  Economies of scale mean that it is
better to pay a specialised company to handle all of this for you and abstract
the complexity and cost away.  Service Level Agreements exist between the
consumer and the water company with regards the quality and availability of
supply, and a water company can, on the whole, do a better job than a single
user.   The point of deliniation between responsibility for water
supply between the water utility and the consumer is at the edge of the
consumer premises, with the in-house pipes and the tap being the responsibility
of the homeowner.

Mimecast
performs a whole host of complex functions including ensuring email is malware
free, applying corporate policy, ensuring email service remains continually
available and ensuring retention for corporate governance, litigation
protection and regulatory compliance.  Mimecast ensures the quality and
availability of email through its Service Level Agreements.   The
user benefits from the focused specialisation on email, and the economies of scale
of a purpose-built Software-as-a-Service platform.  Through the use of
Mimecast Services for Outlook, Mimecast Services for Exchange and our Active
Directory integration customers maintain their local delivery mechanism, the
‘tap’ of email – the Exchange server – while removing all of the other
complicated and expensive infrastructure.

Allowing
users to continue to use Microsoft Outlook in exactly the same way they would
with local email was a goal of Mimecast from the very early days of our service
– drag-and-drop recovery of deleted email; email flowing into the user’s
regular Inbox even during an Exchange outage; the ability to drag incoming
email into Document Management System folders even during an Exchange outage;
and the ability to search potentially decade’s worth of email stored within the
cloud just as you would search a local PST file or Exchange server.

Trying to gain user’s
acceptance of new ways of working is always an uphill and expensive
struggle.  Organisations have also made significant investments in
on-premise technologies.  Mimecast’s seamless hybrid model was designed to
cater for the needs of 56% of the market, what Forrester have recognized as the
largest majority.  Only 28% wanted to fully outsource their email management
and even less, 14% wanted to keep it all in house.