Mimecast, a unified email management company offering SaaS-based email security, continuity, policy control and archiving, has today announced the launch of Mimecast Continuity Services for the BlackBerry Wireless Solution. The new service is the first to enable enterprise IT managers to provide uninterrupted email access to BlackBerry smartphone users in the event of a Microsoft Exchange outage, a BlackBerry Enterprise Server failure and Research in Motion infrastructure downtime.
Until now, businesses have been limited in their range of continuity choices for the BlackBerry solution, relying on SaaS services that require the availability of BlackBerry Enterprise Server or server replication solutions.
By bypassing the BlackBerry Enterprise Server and communicating directly with the handset from the cloud, Mimecast's Continuity Service ensures that critical mobile workers can remain connected; sending, receiving and deleting mail as normal, during server downtime. Whether operating in standard or continuity mode, complete integration between Mimecast's security, continuity and archiving service elements ensures continuous and consistent enforcement of email security, data loss prevention and archiving policies at all times, supporting businesses' compliance and security needs.
Peter Bauer, founder and CEO of Mimecast, said: "Our own research recently revealed that just 36 percent of UK companies had a proper email continuity strategy, despite 97 percent of written business communication being over email. With the BlackBerry solution established in an ever growing number of IT departments, extending business critical email continuity to BlackBerry devices has become an essential requirement."
Mimecast has been providing continuity services to hundreds of thousands of email users around the world over the last seven years. Mimecast Continuity Services for the BlackBerry Wireless Solution is the first extension of the company's existing range of email disaster recovery services to mobile devices. With Mimecast, users are able to send and receive email and access their personal archive through a variety of mail clients including Microsoft Outlook (desktop), Mimecast Personal Portal (web) and BlackBerry smartphones (mobile) in the event of scheduled or unplanned mail server outages or connectivity failures.
In response to the announcement, Tim Hyman, IT Director at prominent UK law firm Taylor Wessing, said: "The Mimecast system has already gone a long way to ensuring the 100% availability of email during times of disruption to internal systems. The development of a genuinely robust BlackBerry solution is the final piece in the jigsaw as it means that our lawyers will be able to access their email from the device they favour, virtually eliminating the inconvenience and productivity loss of email downtime."
Stephen Drake, Program Vice President, Mobility and Telecom at analyst firm IDC, added: "Solutions such as those from Mimecast address a real issue for IT Managers with large numbers of users depending heavily on their BlackBerry smart-phones. The fact is, Exchange Servers and BlackBerry servers are invariably in the same location, so in the event of a disaster the chances are both will go down. The Mimecast service also ensures users remain connected in the event of a RIM NOC failure, uniquely removing an additional potential point of failure."