Advanced and Federated Accounts - Advanced Account Administration Console

This article provides information on the Advanced Account Administration Console, its features, and differences from Federated Account Administration, enabling centralized management of multiple Mimecast accounts with tailored policies and permissions.

Introduction

By default, all customer accounts are created with a self-contained (single) Mimecast account. However, organizations with more complex requirements can have more than one account. This allows for:

• Domain sharing (where a master account is an intelligent mail bridgehead)
• Centralized domain management and policy administration.

The Advanced Account Administration Console enables administrators to link multiple Mimecast accounts to one overall master account. Group accounts can also be used to create a hierarchy. This functionality is typically used by large organizations or those requiring segregated administration (e.g. regions). This allows an administrator to maintain several Mimecast accounts, and allocate permissions to regional administrators over those accounts. The console acts as an overarching view of all these accounts.

All accounts must be hosted on the same Mimecast grid.

Why Use Advanced Account Administration?

You can select either Advanced or Federated Account Administration services for your organization. These solutions have been created to introduce:

• More flexible operational controls: Granular controls and hierarchical structure allow for segregated or federated administration in a single domain. Policy control and data visibility rights can be controlled to mirror organizational structure.
• Variable retention options: Apply different message retention policies based on users and groups, to meet commercial and regulatory requirements and control costs.
• Ease deployment and management: Policy inheritance makes setup and ongoing administration simpler, and ensures consistent policy adherence by using group / corporate level policies that replicate down to regional or divisional units.
• A more tailored service: Cost effectively address different user or business unit requirements, by delivering the precise continuity, security, and retention capabilities they require.

Advanced or Federated Account Management Differences

The differences between Advanced and Federated Account Management are provided below:

Account Type	Description	Use Cases
Federated Account Administration	Supports the following optional features: Policy Inheritance: Sub accounts that have opted in to this functionality will respect the policies of the master and / or group accounts. Federated Administration: Administrators belonging to the federated administration domain have access to the nested accounts that have opted in to this functionality. This facilitates administration of multiple accounts from the same browser window.	This is useful for: Organizations with multiple (regional) segregated Mimecast accounts. Partners / Service Providers. The master and group account administrators can control inheritable policies that must be respected by the relevant sub accounts. Sub account administrators can only access content and settings for their own account.
	Example: An organization has four agencies, each with their own unique email domain. a global IT Manager controls specific inheritable policies for the agencies via a master or group account. Each agency's IT managers only has control over their Mimecast account.
Advanced Account Administration	In addition to the features included with Federated Account Administration, Advanced Account Administration also supports domain sharing across multiple Mimecast accounts.	This is useful for large organizations that share the same domain name, but wish to segregate and / or partly or fully federate administrator access and policy configuration.
	Example: An organization has offices in 15 countries. These regional offices all utilize the same domain name, but the global IT Administrator wants to segregate administrator access per region, whilst providing specific inheritable global policies next to specific policies set by the regional administrators.