Ashurst will use the system to improve email security and management for its 2,000 employees in 13 countries. According to the company, Ashurst was previously using an email hygiene gateway system that was implemented and managed in-house. The main reason for the switch was to reduce the workload of the IT department.
Ashurst says that an increasing amount of time was being taken up with reviewing spam and false-positive emails in quarantine. Paolo Picone, IT systems manager at the law firm, estimates that managing email was taking up the workload of one full-time member of the IT department.
The company assessed a number of offerings before deciding on Mimecast due to the amount of control the system allowed them.
Picone said: We had evaluated other email security services in the past and found them wanting in terms of the level of control for IT staff and users. The Mimecast service did not fall into the same trap that we experienced with managed service providers and gave us the policy control and reporting we would expect from any on-premise security system.
The Mimecast service will provide a rolling 10-year email archive system, which Ashurst required for regulatory compliance. The tamper-proof email record will contain a forensic data trail, enabling Ashurst to see if anyone had accessed the email or been copied in on it as well as where and when emails had been stored.
Picone said: We know now that, should the need ever arise, our email data would stand up to scrutiny because Mimecast gives us strong chains of custody. As an international law firm based in the UK, all of our data, including email, must be stored onshore. Mimecast fulfils this requirement giving us an extra layer of resilience and we have a fully archived, always-on email service that gives us all the control we could wish for.
Picone says that the company is already feeling the benefits of the system. Mimecast has eliminated the quarantine issue for us as and the majority of spam is stopped before it can enter the perimeter of our network, having gone through rigorous scanning engines to strip out viruses and malware, he said.
