Johannesburg, 06 Oct 2008
Mimecast, the leader in software-as-a-services with 2 000 international customers, today announced that Sasfin Holdings implemented Mimecast Unified E-mail Management (UEM) across the entire business. Sasfin's 450 users in five divisions at sites across the country now have more transparent control over their e-mail. This has released key IT staff to focus on the important things, like bullet-proof security and complete e-mail chain of custody over what has become a crucial repository of business documents.
End-user empowerment and offsite archiving are the two most compelling reasons behind Sasfin's migration from its internally managed mail system to Mimecast.
Mimecast UEM operates as a software-as-a-service offering that gives clients complete carrier-class infrastructure without them needing to spend a cent on equipment or software. The increasingly tough regulation of the financial services industry together with growing reliance on e-mail meant that Sasfin had to find a solution that was not only cost-effective, but had absolutely iron-clad compliance for long term archival and day-to-day actual usage.
“Off-site archiving and how it is done affects the (chain of custody http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_of_custody) when working with electronic evidence,” says Garth Wittles, MD of Mimecast South Africa. “Mimecast's system is compliant with FAIS* requirements. The way the data is stored ensures that the integrity of the mail is retained and that it can be used as supporting evidence should it be needed. In the financial services industry, where the timing of an instruction from a client can mean the difference between a profit and a loss, the integrity of e-mail evidence is vital.”
As well as records retention, Sasfin also has numerous rules for day-to-day e-mail usage, ranging from who can send and receive images to content filtering and file extension limitations. Dawie Olivier, GM of Information Technology at Sasfin Holdings says: “What files and which people can and can't send or receive can become such a political issue, but it's really about business. Files and attachments chew up bandwidth and certain topics and language are inappropriate for corporate email.”
But with all these rules comes the management of them. In the past this required one and a half full time IT personnel responding to an average of 250 email support requests per day. With Mimecast this is now down to just 15 requests a day. Olivier comments: “I now have my highly trained IT staff proactively looking for security flaws and fixes for them, not reactively dealing with irate users who can't understand why they aren't getting their mail.”
The key difference between Mimecast and the previous in-house system is that it does not quarantine mail in an unresponsive black hole. The users still receive all of their e-mail, just not with potentially illegitimate content or attachments. Users can then decide whether the content or attachment is necessary, and if so, request for it to be released. “If it is a photo of a friend's wedding, a PowerPoint presentation with amusing cats and uplifting sayings or a Dilbert cartoon, they can ask the sender that the mail be redirected to a personal e-mail address. If it's business critical they can request that it be released. Of the 15 requests we get each day, the majority are now business related, which is a big change,” says Olivier.
In addition, Mimecast stores all mail sent and received for a client-selected period of up to ten years in one of its data centres. “This allows users to delete mails locally and keep their inboxes under control as they know that every mail is just one quick search away,” says Olivier. “It also changes user behaviour. There is nothing like the promise of perpetuity to make a person think twice about what they are writing when using their corporate e-mail account,” he says.
For the Sasfin Holdings IT department the Mimecast implementation was a “huge success from a system availability and customer satisfaction point of view,” says Olivier. “The user feedback has been extremely positive and we are now moving ahead with an e-mail branding campaign with our marketing team.”
* FAIS: Financial Advisory and Intermediary Services Act of 2002
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