Mimecast announces large scale local investment in Australia
Cloud-based security company, Mimecast, has announced large scale local investment in Australia, with the opening of a new Sydney office, doubling its local head count since March 31, and inaugurating two new datacentres for customers to meet local demand.
Mimecast’s two replicated datacentres are in separate co-located facilities in New South Wales and operate on its own proprietary Cloud infrastructure and software architecture. The company has confirmed that the first customers are live on its Australian datacentres, with more than 50 other customers expected to migrate their data before the end of the year.
Mimecast Australia country manager, Nicholas Lennon, said the new Australian datacentres help form a global network of 10 datacentres around the world, serving the email security and data needs of more than 13,000 customers.
It has also opened a new sales office in Sydney in response to significant demand for its services. Mimecast Australia now employs 22 people across its Sydney and Melbourne offices, up from 12 in March.
“Our ongoing investment in Australia – including the new datacentres, and the opening of our new offices in Sydney – is ultimately making email and corporate data safer for Australian organisations,” he said.
Mimecast also recently released local research, revealing what Australian businesses consider a genuine threat to their bottom line and how prepared they are to deal with the wide range of risks to business.
The new study, From Cryptolocker to Cloud - the value and management of email and corporate data in Australia, found email is still the most critical business tool (74 per cent), even more so than smartphones (five per cent), and confirmed that having a local datacentre presence is a key business requirement when considering Cloud services.
The study also revealed the biggest concerns arising from an email outage are an increase in customer service complaints (29 per cent) and employee dissatisfaction (28 per cent). Ransomware is seen as a growing threat in Australia, with one in three companies surveyed confirming they had been targeted but only five per cent said they would pay the ransom to retrieve their email and corporate data.
Mimecast CEO, Peter Bauer, said in the last year alone, Australia has seen its fair share of data leaks, hacks and ransomware attacks. He claimed email is often the starting point for all of this and has become a primary way to attack organisations.
“This report shows the range of risks an IT team needs to consider today to keep email working, safe from attack and its data stored securely. This is true for organisations using traditional on-premises email like Microsoft Exchange, but it is also true for those taking their email to the Cloud with services like Office 365,”he said.
Other key findings include:
- There are challenges associated with a migration to Microsoft Office 365, the biggest being the risk of potential email disruption (46 per cent)
- 77 per cent of respondents consider it important for their business and customer data to be hosted within Australia. The key reasons are for legal and compliance requirements (78 per cent). Other factors include latency and application performance (75 per cent), to allay potential customer concerns around data location (72 per cent) and a distrust of foreign national governments (50 per cent).
- IT managers demonstrate strong confidence in their level of preparedness for these threats, however while 77 per cent rate their company as highly prepared for malware and viruses, only 52 per cent consider their organisations to be highly prepared for outages.
