New report highlights Mimecast South African sector growth

As those of you who follow us will know BackChannel produces a bi-annual Hosted Email Security report, a report that has been a must read for anybody working in the e-mail security market for over 5 years. The period January 2012 - 2013 has been one of the most dynamic have been some of the most interesting of recent years.

The data reported are a survey of over one million  'Live' email services" around the globe.  Data from this survey identifies the key vendors, their local & international coverage, market positions, customer profile and performance over time.  

The reports provide measured data blended with relevant demographic & geographic data enabling the reader to gain the clearest view of the worldwide market for these technologies.

One of the most dynamic of the developed markets has been South Africa where one company has grown to not only dominate its home market, but to take a seat at the top table of international vendors along with Microsoft, Google and Symantec, that company is Mimecast.

Mimecasts install base in South Africa grew significantly since we reported on their progress in 2012 growing their overall market share to 34% with this figure rising to 41% amongst larger Enterprise customers.  

Sales performance in certain sectors has seen as many as 52% of the companies in a sector choosing a service choosing Mimecast; you can see a breakdown of sector performance on their site  

Some comment on Mimecast and our research:

IT WEB South Africa article.
BlueChip Journal ICT
Financial Mail
SecuritySA

Look out for more news from BackChannel on Cloud, PaaS & IaaS coming over the next few months.

Evernote Hack: A well a handled Cloud service hack

Being completely up front we love Evernote here at BackChannel, almost everyone uses it.

So it was a bit of a disappointment that a company that relies so heavily on its web infrastructure should fail to learn the lessons about 'crown jewels' security like  Microsoft, RSA, Twitter etc, etc...

As an old security guy I think they did exactly the right thing in in notifying their customers and forcing the password reset and I'm not alone in that opinion.  But as you would expect with 50,000,000 users needing to change their password; there have been numerous gotcha's for people who signed up with now defunct mail addresses, especially those who have recently upgraded and couldn't access their 'local' data as a result.  Checking out the community posts on the relevant Blog posting Evernote seem to be handling it fairly well and hopefully in future they will take more care.

As my Dad said 'Son the most valuable lessons learned are also the most expensive'
Anyhow final thought- If you're moving anything to a Cloud Service make sure you understand what you're buying into; make sure you can get to mission critical data in any circumstances, make sure your provider has a clear and documented policy on service denial, ensure they have a documented process for recovery and proper insurance against service failure & data loss - after all its not their data they're looking after it's yours.