Mimecast launches BlackBerry email continuity service

Mimecast has started up a cloud-based email continuity service for BlackBerry users, promising to provide uninterrupted access in the event of a mail server outage.

The company's Continuity Services product for BlackBerry, announced on Wednesday, is designed to keep email up and running despite Microsoft Exchange, BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) or RIM infrastructure downtime. It is the first mobile client from Mimecast, which already has an Outlook desktop client and a web portal.

According to a Mimecast spokesman, the company's software-as-a-service (SaaS) architecture, which involves multiple geographically-separated datacentres, "guarantees 100 percent availability".

Mimecast provides a background application for BlackBerry devices. The app sits idle until a service interruption takes place, in which case it lets Mimecast's servers talk directly to the BlackBerry smartphone, cutting out the need for Outlook or BES.

"When an outage occurs, the Mimecast Administrator can activate the service for a single user, location, group or organisation," the spokesman said. "While traditional BlackBerry continuity solutions attempt to provide resilience for individual elements of the organisation's infrastructure, they can't remove critical dependencies such as a BES corruption. The Mimecast solution completely removes all such dependencies."

According to Mimecast, fail-over to the company's email continuity service provides consistent enforcement of email security, data loss prevention and archiving policies, so as to meet with compliance requirements.