- Sector:
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Legal
- Size:
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1600 End Users
- Location:
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Global
Context
Bird & Bird, an international law firm with 1,600 employees across 16 countries, initially selected Mimecast’s comprehensive email management solution to keep spam at bay. This, coupled with the substantial growth of Bird & Bird’s email environment resulting from a series of mergers and and the opening of new international offices, meant that there was a strong requirement for their systems to be available 24x7 to accommodate all jurisdictions, making email continuity all the more important.
Challenge
Bird & Bird were previously using an alternative cloud-based email security solution. However, the service was experiencing reliability and significant security issues, with spammers targeting internal distribution lists and partners complaining about the unacceptable volume of unsolicited emails getting through. The previous security provider failed to address these issues and this led IT Director Karen Jacks to seek an alternative solution.
Solution
Bird & Bird selected Mimecast initially to provide email security services, business continuity and disaster recovery, with an immediate priority of dealing with the spam issue. “We were committed to cloud-based email management as part of the firm’s Corporate Responsibility policy to encourage green technology. The cloud allows us to reduce the number of servers we use as well as our on-site storage capacity, but we felt let down by our previous provider,” explains Jacks. “Mimecast has a good reputation and a strong legal client base, and having made some enquiries I saw that fellow IT Directors were keen to recommend them. Mimecast became an obvious choice for us.”
Implementation was completed in spring 2010. “We organised a global roll-out swapping all of our 1,600 users from our previous provider to Mimecast at the same time,” says Jacks, adding that although this was a big project, the switchover was pretty straightforward. “Initially we saw the same issue again, with distribution lists being spammed, but thanks to Mimecast’s customer service team we resolved it once and for all. Overall we’ve been really pleased.”
Mimecast provides additional value over and above the high quality of service provided, “Policies can be applied on a country level to support our operations out of Asia, and there are features like the digest message, which means that users can now manage their own quarantine. Mimecast seems to set itself apart from other providers because of its willingness to work with customers to develop ways of resolving their specific challenges, and with add-ons like Mimecast BlackBerry Continuity and BlackBerry Archive Search, they are driving innovations that will keep them ahead of the competition,” concludes Jacks.
Although Bird & Bird already had robust business continuity plan, Mimecast’s built-in email continuity is an important benefit. “With Mimecast providing continuity and disaster recovery as part of the service, it adds a lot of resilience to the business. From an IT service delivery perspective, we feel much more confident now in the services supporting our email” reinforces Jon Spencer, Infrastructure Manager at Bird & Bird. “We invoked Mimecast’s continuity during a recent office move and our users continued to work seamlessly without any issues at all”.
“Having seen the benefits of working with Mimecast for email security and continuity and the easy accessibility and search capability of the 58 day email archive, we started to evaluate the possibility of replacing Enterprise Vault with Mimecast’s ten-year archive,” says Jacks. Bird & Bird had implemented Enterprise Vault in their London office, where some mailboxes stood at 30GB. However, when they started considering their global email archiving strategy, they realised that due to stubbing their current system didn’t integrate well with their document management system, WorkSite, and found that overall a cloud-based service was a much better fit for the firms CSR policy. “It made absolutely no sense to install an Enterprise Vault server in each of our larger offices, and when you consider the backups, the licencing, and the staff required to manage it all, we have saved a significant amount of time and money by choosing to move our email archiving to Mimecast”
Bird & Bird will roll out UEM Enterprise in August 2011. “Our users will see the benefits of the Mimecast straight away, as they will be able to search their archive without having to restore their stubbed emails, and from an IT perspective, we will reduce the pressure on our Exchange infrastructure with global policies that will help us control the size of our mailboxes,” concludes Spencer.
Jon Spencer comments on the advantages of switching to Mimecast; “The fact that Mimecast can deliver email security, continuity and archiving in one integrated platform and can support us with the same level of service and support globally makes them stand out from their competitors.
