Most companies today rely on Microsoft 365 or other cloud services for email. Microsoft offerings are mostly sufficient to meet the needs of small businesses, but in the case of complex or hybrid infrastructures, third-party enhancements often make sense. To provide the best possible security for business-critical email communication, companies ideally choose solutions like Retarus’ Enterprise Cloud Services to complement Microsoft 365. In addition to the security aspects, these services also take into account delivery success, continuity, compliance, application traffic, and routing in complex infrastructures.
Fragmented Architectures Lead to Poor Management, Decreased Reliability, and Lowered Deliverability
In various projects with our partners, one of the biggest challenges was that the complexity of system architectures had grown over the past decades. The result was a difficult balancing act between on-premises and cloud applications as well as in-house email infrastructures causing huge amounts of workload. To successfully and consistently implement a cloud-first strategy, however, these issues must be clearly resolved and restructured to meet customer requirements.
Actively Manage All Email Traffic
Globally distributed, heterogeneous, or sometimes antiquated on-premises system landscapes cannot be migrated to the cloud without difficulties. It is precisely these complex or hybrid email infrastructures in the enterprise environment that need to be rounded out and protected with important add-on services in order to keep communication — and the business — running. For example, Microsoft’s capped receive and send volume for transactional emails must be circumvented by separating workplace and application traffic. All email communications should also be protected against downtime with a vendor-agnostic “active” backup solution. And finally, intelligent routing forms the basis for efficient workflow automation, simplifying and consolidating a company’s in-house infrastructure.
“But What About Sending Emails from Applications?”
When migrating to Microsoft 365, user-based email traffic can usually be handled very well. But many companies are faced with the question of how to deal with the much larger volume of emails sent from applications these days. Even Microsoft itself advises customers to use specialized third-party providers for this due to their own volume restrictions.
With Transactional Email, Retarus customers are able to send large volumes of automated emails via standard interfaces such as REST API or SMTP directly from existing business applications through the powerful and 100% GDPR-compliant infrastructure of the Retarus Enterprise Cloud — without burdening their own email infrastructure. Thanks to Retarus’ CSA certification and sophisticated reputation management, delivery rates are always excellent. Response and bounce management by Retarus is the perfect enhancement for Transactional Email. This service enables customers to keep the return channel under control at all times after a high volume of emails has been sent.
Routing and Automated Workflows
In addition, Retarus Predelivery Logic allows all incoming email traffic to be managed, organized, redirected, or customized using self-defined rules — upstream of Microsoft 365. Furthermore, companies are on the safe side when it comes to data protection, legal regulations, and compliance. Retarus processes all data in its own, auditable data centers, meeting industry-specific standards, GDPR requirements, and the most stringent compliance requirements.
Predelivery Logic also opens up new opportunities for Retarus partners. They can use their expertise and process knowledge for customer projects in a more targeted manner — by creating their own sets of rules or by processing and distributing emails from other business applications in their portfolio. In this way, partners can offer clear added value instead of simply selling standardized security services.
Trace and Recover further protects email traffic from business applications and accelerates support processes. This intelligent short-term storage enables service or contact center employees to quickly find and resend lost transactional emails without needing to access the business application that originally sent the emails or the application’s workflows.
Stand-Alone Email Continuity
When it comes to email continuity, it is important to rely on a service separate from the primary email provider. The Retarus solution keeps running even if, for example, Exchange Online has a large-scale failure or comes under a targeted attack. Pre-provisioned webmail inboxes are available to ensure a transition that is as seamless as possible. Customers can still be contacted via their customary email address. Damage to the company’s image and losses due to inaccessibility are reduced to an absolute minimum.
Encryption and Archiving
Retarus Email Encryption supports all common standards to enable user-friendly, secure encryption of business-critical messages. Thanks to webmailer integration and key management, broad use and easy access even for communication partners without their own encryption capabilities is ensured. With Retarus Email Archive, companies can store their business communications in a tamper-proof manner and in accordance with current compliance requirements. Thanks to a connector, the process is smooth and does not have any storage limits. Searches take mere seconds and there is a granular access system that includes complete logging whenever the system is accessed.
