PrintIT Reseller - issue 66

01732 759725 32 EMAIL SECURITY Email security company Mailsphere, recently announced its rebrand and relaunch as Xift. PrintIT Reseller caught up with Director Peter Groucutt, to find out more Mailsphere relaunches as Xift PrintIT Reseller (PITR): Why the rebrand? Peter Groucutt (PG): Email has changed. Increasingly, mailboxes are in Office365 rather than on-premise Exchange servers. Those mailboxes still need spam and virus protection, but with that change comes the need to archive data from other sources. We rebranded to align with our future roadmap. Mailsphere was designed around providing security and compliance for email. We wanted to give companies an alternative to traditional, expensive SEG (Secure Email Gateway) products. As more of our customers moved into Office 365 they started asking us for search, archive and protection for other parts of the Office 365 suite like Sharepoint, OneDrive and Teams. We chose this name because of the parallels with sifting to find value. Xift separates the proverbial wheat from the chaff - the useful data from the useless or dangerous. We have an ambitious development roadmap planned expanding Xift beyond email archive to protect more data sources. We are adding new functionality, improving the UI and investing in our support team. As the product moves away from just email security, it was the right time to move our brand on too. Mailsphere is where we started, but Xift is where we are going. PITR: What are the biggest challenges facing businesses when navigating the shift from on-premise to Office365? PG: In our minds, without a doubt it is preparing the users for a different experience. The additional benefits of sharing and collaboration with Office 365 are massive but a lot of smaller companies make the change without taking their end-users on the journey with them. It’s as important as the technical migration but can be an afterthought. By including just a few simple training sessions early on, you make the transition smoother and users are more likely to make changes to their working practices. PITR: In the same vein, from a resellers’ perspective, what are the opportunities within the email security market. And how are you supporting your reseller partners to capitalise on these? PG: I think all of us in IT have seen two very clear trends emerging over the past five years or so. Firstly, cloud adoption enables companies to focus on their core business activities and worry a lot less about managing internal systems. The second is an exponential increase in cyber threats from a myriad of different sources. The threats aimed at SMEs are largely driven by a shift in organised crime to this new low-risk, high reward business model. These two drivers mean that there is huge opportunity for resellers in the email security market. Today the most exploited attack vector for any cyber- attack is still email and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Additionally, any sensible defence mechanism from an outage of your primary technology provider is to have resilience from a third-party. The combination of these factors means that companies like Xift are a must for any business now. Xift’s (pronounced zift) founders hail from business continuity specialist Databarracks, HP and MessageLabs (now owned by Symantec). Tom Roberts, Oliver Mather and Peter Groucutt ran Databarracks, a specialist disaster recovery service provider for the last 15 years. Lee Burgess has been in enterprise technology for over 20 years and is the chief technologist behind Xift. Lastly, Stephen Chandler and Ian Milbourn are obviously not strangers to the email security market, having founded, run and ultimately sold MessageLabs to Symantec for $700 million in 2008. Together, the group combine experience in enterprise tech, focused customer service and email security to deliver a modern solution, fit for today’s challenges and have big ambitions for product development and the market opportunity.