Spamina Launches UK-Based Cloud Email Security

Spanish cloud email security provider Spamina said on Monday it would team up with the UK’s In-Tuition Networks in a deal that will see Spamina’s British customers serviced from a new data centre in London.

Spamina provides cloud-based email services such as firewalls, disaster recovery and archiving. In-Tuition, for its part, is the official UK partner for the VMware-owned collaboration suite Zimbra, and provides various cloud-based email hosting services.

Legal obligations

The deal is partly a way for Spamina to satisfy legal obligations requiring some companies to host their data within the UK, the company said.

“By appointing In-Tuition as our strategic partner for the UK we are addressing both the legal obligation of some organisations to hold data in the UK, and the legitimate concern of others as to where their data is stored,” said Dan Power, UK country manager at Spamina, in a statement. “Whilst many of our customers understand the benefit of hosting services in the cloud there is also considerable peace of mind in knowing exactly where their email is being processed and stored.”

The arrangement will give Spamina customers access to In-Tuition’s high-performance cloud hosting platform, which is housed in a Tier 3 data centre, according to the company.

Earlier this month McAfee also activated a London data centre, its fifth cloud data centre in the past 12 months.

IT services provider Computacenter is another company targeting cloud computing services at UK customers, in January launching what it is calling its Computacenter cloud computing service, or C3 for short. The first C3 service is a cloud email offering called C3Mail.

Pulling the plug

On the other hand, not everyone believes cloud email is all it’s cracked up to be, with Cisco Systems in February pulling the plug on Cisco Mail, the hosted email service it launched a mere 13 months ago.

While Cisco Mail was “well received”, the company found that customers were not interested in hosted email as much as they cared about “social software and video”, Cisco said in a 22 February blog post announcing the decision. Cisco declined to provide further details.