Arctera Enterprise Vault is a file archiving option.
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Mimecast Cloud Archive
Score 9.5 out of 10
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Mimecast Cloud Archive provides an archive storage solution for data retention, as well as search and retrieval of email, attachments and MS Teams conversations. The cloud archiving solution offers search capabilities for employees and automated tools for administrators that simplify management of mailboxes, e-discovery and litigation support.
It is not linked to a specific hardware component and can be installed on any platform. It is a perfect solution for basically all companies and the user experience is simple and easy to use. Another positive point is that it has become the best solution for archiving emails and secret documents. The points of attention revolve around the cost for companies with many users. If there is no planning, it can become a major cost.
Given all the threats that are out there and the fact many come in via email, I think Mimecast is a great solution for any business of any size. If your business is heavily regulated then you have even more reason to use Mimecast. You might be able to do a lot of these things yourself but why would you? Mimecast employees are experts, the best in the industry, at knowing how email works and how to protect it.
EV FSA had 2 stubbing options. We ended up using the IE shortcut as the stub replacement on the file system. In the DFS environment using DFSR the IE shortcuts allowed us to quickly and easily archive the data while allowing users to still access their data via the web or stub format. We were also able to exclude certain folders from archiving like the dfsrprivate folder. The newer versions of EV 11 and up have a better user interface to access this content from the web.
EV SharePoint implementation was pretty simple for us. Document Library archiving was pretty seamless. Archiving the different versions in sharepoint also helped further reduce total cost of storage.
EV Exchange was a good addition to our archiving portfolio. In our case we did not use the stubbing mechanism. Instead, we used the vault cache methodology. We had the option to pull down the full archive versus just the header information. The concern at the time was how quickly we could update the vault cache on the client. We ended up scaling out our EV environment to ensure the push of data could get to all our clients since we were in the middle of a notes to exchange migration. Overall I was impressed with Vault Cache and its capabilities. I also liked the ability to manage the Vault Cache and perform resets where necessary from the web browser interface.
We had EV FSA, SharePoint and Exchange as one single environment so we benefited from overall single instances of a file. Our backend systems were Netapp which we enabled deduplication for further improve storage savings. EV had a good SQL Reporting mechanism for Archiving and plenty of good canned reports.
It archives every email into and out of your enterprise including mail between internal users. This provides a legally acceptable archive that we can access at any point to find emails whether we need just one from a year ago or a lot to enter into a court case.
Since we have our MX record pointing to them first, they host all of our email in the cloud so users can access it even in the event our local email repository is down. We used this feature quite well during this past years Hurricane season.
Mimecast has a feature that allows me to sandbox all links, in emails, before users are redirected to them. This has saved us several times in that users clicked on links they should not have but Mimecast intercepted the request and stopped the user from going to the site.
Symantec Enterprise is one of the best in the industry. We have already deployed their product to thousands of devices in the company and it would be a huge project to go through and change to an alternative product. We have also had much luck in dealing with their customer support. They have been very pleasant to deal with and their technical support has been quite knowledgeable in fixing our issues. This leaves us with very little reason to switch to a new product. We would have to see a significant amount of cost savings to switch to an alternative that offers all the same features and modules.
The archive is easy to use and the searching is highly customizable. You can easily search based on timeframe, sender, recipient, words, phrases, and attachments. The ability to search keywords within attachments, body, and subject line is incredibly helpful. We're able to quickly and easily find what we're looking for.
There is never an issue. Everytime I have needed to access my own personal search archive or globally search across the whole business it works each time. I cannot recall a time where the service was down when needed to be used and all our staff use it daily.
The stability of the tool is the biggest factor, it has a fantastic uptime and the loading speed is exceptional. Long gone are the days of waiting for Outlook to open up a traditional PST archive, I can simply click, find what I need and go, usually, before outlook has opened the archive. It is an exceptionally efficient tool.
It does a good job. The support team of the product was good and responsive and was also able to fix the issues I was experiencing at the time. It isn't perfect and takes some time to set up properly in the environment but once set up the product does what it is supposed to do which is what you are paying for.
We used Mimecast professional services for the implementation and it was flawless as we were migrating from a competitor's product. The only downside was the amount of time required to ingest all the data as this was coming from a few different sources and in some cases it took months to migrate and index all the content. Apart from that the process was very well guided, with plenty of communication all throughout and without any major issues or downtime.
Using Enterprise Vault means having a system that is not directly integrated in your backups, and not tied to the upgrade kadence of your backup systems is nice. With CommVault or other backup driven software the upgrade cycle and user experience is not always tied to the desktop products so users can be left using older versions. In addition, CommVault and other backup based software often does not have good litigation hold and search tools.
Mimecast gave us some extra features that we believed were beneficial to our business. Removing the archive from the Microsoft hardware was also good to allow separation. Plus, adding the optional exchange backup made Mimecast a clear choice.
Before we enabled our Mimecast archive, we had multiple cases of users who had 10k+ emails "disappear" and could not find them. Trying to figure this out with Microsoft is near impossible. IT spent 5-10 hours on each situation trying to find, recover, and move the emails back into the user's mailbox.
A couple term cases happened as well where the user deleted everything in their mailbox and recoverable area had be cleared automatically by the time we found out. One of them would have been 28k emails and would take days to recover.
Since having Mimecast, it is a matter of going to the mailbox in the Sync and Recover and clicking a few things and restoring all the data. Super easy and restoring the data takes less time than manually doing it with a Microsoft Content Search export.
