Zimbra Email: For Many, Simply Owned—Not Considered Essential
For many people, email is considered something that is merely owned, rather than something truly important. Email usually becomes important only when there is a security threat to the data stored within it.
In today’s modern business era, many functions, processes, and systems are capable of distributing messages to staff, suppliers, and—most importantly—receiving requests from customers. Why, then, is email not treated with the same level of importance as other IT systems within a business? In many cases, email is seen as something ordinary and nothing more than a business commodity, with its only future being the pursuit of the lowest possible cost.
Interacting with suppliers and customers is a critical business requirement. Companies must ensure that this communication can take place without disruption and in a timely manner. For example, IndonesianCloud itself has secured many contracts simply by responding to incoming email inquiries quickly and efficiently. This is why our sales team applies a specific Service Level Agreement (SLA) for email response times.
It is therefore important for companies to understand how many customer relationships and business communications rely on email, as well as the potential losses that may occur if email services are unavailable.
Zimbra Email for Today’s Business Era
Beyond Always-Online Email: Security as a Critical Concern
Beyond having email that is always online, another major concern is email security. With the rise of increasingly sophisticated fraud methods, companies must find ways to ensure that outgoing emails can be verified as authentic, genuine, untampered, and traceable. When companies use public email services such as @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or @icloud.com, how can recipients be certain that the email they receive is legitimate? In addition, companies must protect themselves and safeguard confidential information from being sent to unauthorized recipients.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP) technologies play an important role here. However, companies that are unable to invest in such technologies can still gain benefits simply by auditing their email logs and, when suspicion arises, discreetly monitoring the suspected employee’s mailbox. This capability is crucial for tracing data leaks and stopping them before they escalate. The same principle applies to email retention and recovery after deletion.
If an employee sends an email that they know should not have been sent, the first thing they are likely to do is delete it. Unless a company is able to recover deleted emails, it becomes very difficult to prove that the email was ever sent. This also applies to legitimate emails that are accidentally deleted, or emails that were intentionally deleted but later need to be restored. Archiving deleted emails instead of permanently removing them is a much safer approach.
The Growth of Mobile Devices in the Modern Era
The rapid development of mobile devices and the ease of accessing email anytime and anywhere, from any device, introduce new risks for companies. The theft of smartphones, tablets, and laptops is increasingly common. Unless corporate email systems are properly secured, stolen devices can become easy gateways into a company’s business, providing direct access to send emails from accounts stored on the stolen device.
To ensure confidentiality, IT departments require a way to remotely disable email access and recover protected data. With standard email systems that rely on IMAP, SMTP, or POP3, there is no built-in capability to remotely control or manage devices.
As technology continues to mature, one inevitable trend is the increase in file sizes. For example, five years ago, sending an image larger than 1MB was almost unheard of, whereas today it is nearly impossible to send an image smaller than 5MB. The same applies to business applications such as PowerPoint presentations, where embedded images can easily inflate file sizes to 20–30MB.
Companies are expected to be able to send large files through their email systems, yet it does not take long for excessive bandwidth consumption to occur. Bandwidth demand is therefore an important factor when calculating the total cost of an email system. Bandwidth limitations also directly affect how quickly employees can respond to emails when connected through slow or unstable networks.
Analyzing Corporate Email Capabilities
Considering the points above, companies are strongly advised to analyze and measure the capabilities of their current email systems. The same analysis should be applied when selecting a cloud-based email service provider: how easily emails can be tracked, audited, deleted, and recovered in the event of a disruption; how brand protection against fraud is ensured through digital email signatures so recipients can verify the authenticity of emails; and how the system performs when sending large volumes of email, not only over high-speed networks.
Most cloud-based email systems do not provide long-term email storage, do not enable Disaster Recovery (DR), and are often hosted in foreign countries that may have different data privacy regulations. While these services may offer low costs, companies must weigh those savings against the potential business impact of service outages and the inability to audit employee activity and communication trails.
Zimbra Email as a Solution
IndonesianCloud has recently launched a cloud-based Zimbra Email service. This solution is hosted in Indonesia and includes a 180-day email retention system, Disaster Recovery enabled through replication to a secondary data center, and customizable services that provide full control over security, access, and remote device management.
Zimbra is fully compatible with Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and MAPI, making it a true drop-in replacement for Microsoft Exchange. This means mobile devices can be configured with remote wipe capabilities, file transfers are optimized for large attachments, and existing investments in Microsoft Outlook can continue to be utilized. IndonesianCloud also provides Zimbra Desktop as a free client alternative to Outlook, helping companies further reduce costs.
IndonesianCloud Zimbra Email is available starting at IDR 24,000 per user with 5GB mailbox storage, and IDR 55,000 per user with 50GB mailbox storage. For more information, please contact sales@indonesiancloud.com.
Neil Cresswell
CEO – IndonesianCloud
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