The importance of email in businesses and the intelligence, productivity and security that can be gleaned from it means that companies may in the future store their data with cloud providers and expect dividends from the analysis and processing of the information, says global cloud email company Mimecast chief scientist Dr Nathaniel Borenstein.

Mimecast is currently developing and invest- ing in the concept of business data banking: where a trusted third-party cloud provider becomes as fundamental to the operations of companies as financial banks are currently. The idea includes analysis and processing of this information to boost company functionality by improving its day-to-day business operations.

Borenstein is the co-creator of the Internet email transmission protocol Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions, which defines the mechanism for the transmission of data (other than basic characters) over email. He joined Mimecast in 2010.

“Email is important for businesses of all sizes and unifies the different applications, business processes and communications of a company. Significant value for a business can be created by effectively managing and processing data from this intersection of business communications,” says Mimecast global customer experience officer Garth Wittles.

The scale of structured and unstructured business data produced daily means that Mimecast has had to continuously develop its architecture in order to ensure that its platform enables customers to cost-effectively manage data, secure and store critical business information, he notes.

“The fragmentation of data on networks, the business risks of lax data management, from a corporate governance perspective, and the increased processing of large volumes of data mean that Mimecast’s services and capabilities will increasingly be sought and used,” Wittles adds.

Further, Mimecast has the ability to provide effective tamperproof electronic reporting and auditing chains to enable large companies, which may produce gigabytes of email data each day, to meet the compliance, regulations and standards of their industry, says Mimecast Africa and South Africa regional MD Brandon Bekker.

The fact that so much business-critical information is produced each day means that Mimecast has an increased focus on large-enterprise customers and aims to grow its presence in this segment of the market, adds Bekker.

“Unified email management built our brand, but this is the base from which we are working towards unified information management, which includes unstructured business data and relevant contextual metadata, to make business data more useful and valuable,” says Wittles.

Mimecast has made significant investments in its engineering team to move from unified email management (UEM) towards unified information management and there is a large focus on understanding how knowledge workers experience and use information, says Mimecast UEM product director Grant Hodgkinson.

“Our team is working to further develop our capabilities, which already enable users to search emails for a wide variety of data and information, even down to character detail in email bodies, and to easily access all the information contained in business emails. We also ensure that access to different documents is secure and that no sensitive data is acci- dentally or intentionally lost or leaked.”

“We are already a trusted partner of many large companies and we are working towards our goal of becoming an information bank, yielding business dividends for our customers,” concludes Hodgkinson.