Chris W. Balmer, head of IT at SGH, said the decision was based on the need to increase levels of resilience and increase redundancy in the system. The company also wanted to remove the need to deal with a third party when it needed to make a change to the email system.
SGH’s previous email management system, purchased through its ISP, included antivirus handled at the perimeter of the network. This arrangement meant that if, for example, we were trying to alter our email configurations due to potential blacklisting, we couldn’t make the change ourselves but would have to channel our request via the ISP and the hosted supplier, said Balmer.
Balmer said guaranteed email access from anywhere 24 hours a day was one of the main benefits of adopting Mimecast’s service. The ability to archive emails was also attractive to the firm. He said: Whereas previously we had emails stored haphazardly all over the network, which were not always accessible by the network administrators, now we have a central email repository.
The company is paying an annual user fee of £50 per user for the service, which includes ten year’s archival of all email traffic. We now have greater accessibility to archived email data as well as the ability to reduce the amount of local storage space allocated per individual, down from 3GB to 100MB per person and I can offload the tedious task of backing up 60GB of email data every night, Balmer said.
The agreement also improves the continuity of email access at the firm. Balmer said: The web-based service from Mimecast gives us access to a purpose built, triple-redundant network operating centre, allowing us to externally capture emails to provide continuity in the event of our Microsoft Exchange Server failing. So in the event of a disaster the partners and staff could still send and receive emails normally and be ale to retrieve online emails sent during the last ten years.
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