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Before you head into Office 365, pull on this cosy Cloud Archive

Mimecast promises fast mail search and (of course) GDPR-friendly tools

Email archiver Mimecast has promised a subscription drug to cut through GDPR pain.

The idea with Cloud Archive is to provide a secure and reliable stash for email data that acts as a safe and secure central resource supporting GDPR requirements, e-discovery, compliance, end-user access, recovery and search.

Mimecast says Cloud Archive uses multiple collection points, including the journal, gateway and synchronization technologies. It retains the original email, detailed metadata (including email recipients and delivery date and time), and a copy of the email if it was changed by company policy enforcement.

Searches in the archive can complete in two seconds and Mimecast offers a seven-second service-level agreement.

Why is the search faster? A Mimecast spokesperson didn't give much away, saying: "Traditionally Office 365 is not designed to find things quickly. One of the main reasons Mimecast's solution is faster is because it's all in the cloud. It's also about the design of the architecture, and how email data is indexed. The more searches users do, the tighter the data resulting in faster responses."

It claims the search speed makes e-discovery of data to be partitioned off on legal holds or identified for compliance or GDPR reasons faster. There is a Case Review app for collecting, identifying, reviewing, culling, and preserving relevant emails and attachments that may need to be exported for detailed analysis or placed on litigation hold for evidentiary preservation.

Sync & Recover for Exchange and Office 365 was launched back in July, when we wrote:

Microsoft Exchange Online doesn't protect against ransomware and downtime, Mimecast says, with Office 365 having no backup-and-recovery capability to help protect email data and maintain business continuity. Sync & Recover for Exchange and Office 365 does. It provides point-and-click recovery of Outlook email, calendar items and contacts in the event of accidental loss, malicious attacks to date or deletion as well as technical failure.

It's now included in Cloud Archive and helps ensure users' email facilities are kept safe and available in the case of on-premises mail server failures. It supports Exchange Server and Exchange Online, and Exchange data recovery is automated.

There is a datasheet here.

Mimecast says Cloud Archive "has long-term data preservation with the archiving of email and attachment data into perpetuity, with no additional fees or charges for storage or retention duration". Perpetuity is a long time.

Cloud Archive lets users access it from their desktops and smart mobile devices, providing a form of personal email disaster recovery. There is an Outlook add-on, Mac app, and mobile apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, Windows Phone (a tad optimistic) and BlackBerry devices.

Mimecast says it provides full IT control over deployment, content access and revocation with users' chosen Mobile Device Management products.

That should save some admin time as users self-recover from a wider set of mail problems.

There is an integration with Salesforce.com, which enables Cloud Archive access and search capabilities within the CRM tool. This is available on the Salesforce App launcher.

What Mimecast is effectively saying is that you don't need to go naked into the Office 365 world.

Put on Cloud Archive clothing and migrate from on-premises Office products use to Office 365 with confidence that your mail service will be reliable, won't need top-heavy administration, users can self-serve, and the GDPR legal hold stuff can be taken care of by the Cloud Archive warm blanket.

For sure GDPR is going to be a pain and Cloud Archive might be the subscription drug you need to cure it, but best check beforehand. ®

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