Q&A Between Anthony Park of CloudTweaks and Mimecast’s chief scientist, Dr. Nathaniel Borenstein, and chief security officer, James Blake

1) In your own words, please describe Mimecast and the company’s service to readers.

Nathaniel: Mimecast is a cloud-based email management company.  We provide our customers with a unified solution for their company’s email that incorporates security, business continuity, storage, and eDiscovery solutions.  With Mimecast, companies’ email systems are more secure, less costly and easier to maintain as several different products can be replaced with one holistic cloud-based solution. In the future, we expect to provide similar services for additional types of information management.

2) What are the key questions most of your customers ask related to security and back-up concerns?

James: The most common security and backup questions/concerns in the industry are typically related to data access and continuity—who can access data and how do you ensure that there are no service interruptions.  Specifically, we’ve seen questions around:

• • Confidentiality of Data: How is data encrypted and how much access does staff have to that data?  It is important for vendors to create an impenetrable wall between its customer’s data, its employees, and other customers’ data.
  • Protective Controls Around the Data: Customers want to know details about how data is protected, including encryption, perimeter security (firewalls), physical security (at the data center) and operational security (change control, incident management, log auditing, staff vetting, etc.);
  • Jurisdiction of the Data: Will the customer breach local regulations or legislation by having data leave the country of origin? And if this is the case, how can my service provider or vendor help me prevent this from happening?  Are there multiple locations or ways that data can be stored locally to mitigate this problem?
  • Judicial Access to Data: What happens when law enforcement requests access to customer data held on a vendor’s system under laws such as the US PATRIOT Act or UK Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act?
  • Continuity of Service: How does my vendor guarantee that my business does not have any service interruptions?  It is important to many companies that their service provider has several geographically dispersed data centers and layers of redundancy to protect against an outage.

Mimecast utilizes a grid computing model which is comprised of multiple geographically dispersed data centers, each containing multiple grid nodes (servers) which themselves contain multiple disks.  Each customer’s processing and data storage is balanced across a number of nodes to increase performance and redundancy, which itself is duplicated across multiple data centers.

This architecture allows Mimecast to lose a disk, a server, a cluster or an entire data center without impacting customer data or service availability.

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