Why Mailfence is the Perfect Secure Email for Small Business

In this Customer Success Story, we share the story of Aya Data, an AI consulting company focused on pioneering AI excellence from Africa. You’ll find how they switched to Mailfence as the perfect secure email for small businesses – and why they’ve never looked back.

In our Customer Success series, we aim to highlight real-life stories of how our customers have tackled challenges and found success with Mailfence. You’ll get a true behind-the-scenes look at some of the challenges they were facing, as well as the tools and strategies they implemented to overcome them.

Meet Aya Data, a Pioneering AI Company

Aya Data is an African AI company that aims to lead in global AI excellence by developing top talent and delivering client-focused, scalable solutions. Their competitive advantage stems from vertical integration across multiple fields:

• data acquisition;
• data annotation;
• and AI solution development.

The company specializes in transforming raw data into structured, machine-readable information through data annotation, while also helping clients build high-quality datasets for AI projects.

They serve various sectors including healthcare, agriculture, and robotics, offering services like medical image annotation and compliant healthcare dataset acquisition.

Aya Data’s product portfolio includes two innovative solutions: AyaGrow, an AI-powered agricultural management platform that combines aerial imaging with ground data to optimize plantation operations, and AyaSpeech, an advanced multilingual communication system that integrates speech recognition, translation, and natural language understanding.

The company has established credibility by partnering with prestigious organizations including Unilever, the UK Government, the Tony Blair Institute, Tidal Music, Nvidia, and MIT, demonstrating their capability to deliver AI solutions at an enterprise level.

You can learn more about Ayadata’s business here.

Why Aya Data Needed an Alternative Secure Email

Before Mailfence, Aya Data was (like so many others) a customer of one of the most popular email service providers in the world. However, as Dr. Prince Oberko, Chief Information Officer tells us, this had become unsustainable.

“Firstly, there were numerous unused applications that were linked to our subscriptions. This led to a substantial cost”, he tells us. “Secondly, as a startup, our company keeps growing its number of employees, which led to an automatic increase in our subscription costs”.

“However, most of our operational staff don’t need all the fancy add-ons. Despite our best efforts to reduce these costs, we were unsuccessful and were moved to a more expensive subscription plan. This left us with no other choice but to search for an alternative”.

This experience echoes what so many other SMEs face daily with Big Tech products.

By their very nature, Big Tech companies are not well-suited for small and medium-sized companies. They usually offer a one-size-fits-all type of subscription, with very little room for customization based on the tools you truly need. Let’s look at Google Workspace as an example:

If we look at storage space, the lowest tier offers you 30 GB. But what if you only need 5 GB? Or 10 GB? Another scenario is that as an admin, you might need more storage than other employees. But any customization based on specific needs is impossible with Google Workspace – it’s a “take it or leave it” approach.

Furthermore, vendor lock-in is a real issue. This happens when a company “locks you in” by making it complicated to move to another provider.

We believe that every software provider should make it as easy as possible to migrate from one service to another. However, this is not a philosophy shared by Big Tech, where monopolistic methods are often used to keep customers.

Mailfence: the Perfect Secure Email for Small Business

Confronted with these issues, Aya Data decided to start looking for an alternative. Prince explains some of the features they were looking for.

“First and foremost, we were seeking an effective and efficient emailing tool with a flexible pricing to manage our costs effectively. We also need a multifaceted system that incorporates various tools: emails, calendars, cloud storage, etc”. “The solution also needed to be lightweight, stable, and reliable”, Prince also adds.

Luckily, with Mailfence for Business, Aya Data was able to get a customized version of Mailfence’s private and secure solution in order to adapt it to the company’s specific security and usage needs. Prince was able to selectively choose which tools his organization needed (email, cloud storage, calendars…), how many users he needed as well as specific storage limits per user.

“Ultimately, we are extremely pleased with our move to Mailfence. It is safe, reliable, and comes with the specific add-ons we need. All of this at an affordable price for a startup like us”.

What Mailfence Can Do For You

In the end, customization and an affordable price were the key factors that made Aya Data opt for Mailfence.

“The entire migration process was excellent, with good communication. We definitely felt adequately supported”, says Prince.

“We would encourage any other business facing the same challenges as we did to try out Mailfence”, concludes Prince. 

Curious to know how Mailfence can help your business? Check out Mailfence for Business, and learn how Mailfence can help your organization leverage our secure communication and document collaboration tools:

• customized version of the Mailfence email solution (graphic presentation, available tools, user profiles, security requirements etc.);
• integration with different authentication or SSO providers;
• your own email domain names;
• control panel and API to create, upgrade and manage your accounts;
• storage and features based on your actual needs, not a “one-size-fits-all” approach.

Is your organization also looking for an alternate secure email for small business? Feel free to get in touch with us to see how Mailfence can solve your collaboration needs!