17 May 2013 21:24:00 AEST 2 MIN READ

Mimecast suffers backlash from 100% SLA

Early this morning, as most of us in Australia were sleeping, cloud email security provider Mimecast experienced a long outage in London; leaving its customers unable to send or receive emails.

The issue was first reported last night at around 9pm AEST and was acknowledged by Mimecast over an hour later.

Mimecast, who criticised Google Apps for not having a 100% service level agreement (SLA), suffered strong backlash from frustrated customers on Twitter.

According to Mimecast's Twitter, some customers are still having issues with their email almost 14 hours after the outage began.

Mimecast positions themselves as a business continuity provider, a cloud system that protects customers from email outages. Their service is backed by a 100% SLA which leaves no room for error.

It is this guarantee which has some customers asking for their money back.

Mimecast protect several top UK law firms who rely on the service for critical matters, especially for urgent court documents.

Ian Moyse, sales director at Workbooks.com and friend of MailGuard, suggests that the worst is yet to come for Mimecast.

"What may really hurt Mimecast is they proudly promote a great deal of large legal firms relying on their service, with users being lawyers who demand always on email that they rely on for critical matters," Mr Moyse said.

"Unfortunately for Mimecast they have made a strong rod for their own back in very public touting of their 100% SLA which customers are touting thick and fast on Twitter," he said.

What do you think about cloud providers having a 100% SLA? Does this change the way you see cloud computing?

Let us know on Twitter.

This article was written with help from Ian Moyse, sales director at Workbooks.com, Eurocloud UK board member & Cloud Industry Forum Governance board member. You can connect with Ian on LinkedIn.