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posted on 27 June 2008 13:57

LONDON 26th June 2008 – Mimecast, a Software-Plus-Services Partner for Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, has been chosen by another leading UK law firm, Shoosmiths, to provide a single service to provision essential email management facilities.

The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform from Mimecast includes email security, archiving and continuity. Shoosmiths elected to replace their existing managed service provider, Black Spider, with the more complete web-based email management service from Mimecast. Shoosmiths’ decision was motivated by the need to have a more appropriat service to help meet the challenges of law firms in the UK, today and tomorrow.

Having assessed the options of on-premise solutions, hosted services and outsourcings in the past, Shoosmiths Infrastructure & Operations Manager, Andrew Downie, decided that a blended approach, combining an in-house email platform with connection to an online service for email management could be a very powerful solution for the firm.

Downie states, “Our decision to switch from a managed service provider just focusing on security to an email management service was a relatively straightforward one. Mimecast provides Shoosmiths with a rolling ten-year email retention archive, a continuity service in the event of any planned or unplanned Microsoft Exchange server downtime, plus all the security features and more that we would expect from an online service for anti-spam and anti-virus.”

As a flourishing law firm with 8 regional offices managing on average 750,000 messages each week, of which at least 60% are spam, the need to provide a more robust archiving solution which enables the law firm to meet their regulatory compliance standards is paramount. In addition, the Mimecast service offers a comprehensive ‘chains-of-custody’ trail. This means that should Shoosmiths ever need to produce email data to substantiate or reject a claim, they can be confident that it will stand up in court, as opposed to on-premise, fragmented email management systems which are subject to single points of failure and are not tamper proof.

According to Downie, “We were aware that our current approach of using Personal Storage Tables (PST) files within Microsoft Exchange was inadequate as it offered no visibility to the administrator, so trying to retrieve emails was very time consuming and impractical.” He added, “A major factor when considering the Mimecast service was that it gave users and administrators instant and easy access to search for all our emails that are stored in the 10 year archiving system. It also offers the extra guarantee that those historical records could not be deleted or tampered with in any way. Further, any authorized or unauthorized access to emails will now be recorded by the system.”

The pressures for any law firm to have seamless and ‘always on’ email continuity are significant. The firm’s lawyers are always in contact with clients and the requirement to communicate and share information is absolutely critical. Provisioning for disaster recovery has, in the past, been a very expensive and complex activity but Downie is pleased he has found a better way. He explains, “We were particularly impressed with the new Mimecast Services for Outlook integration which allows email users to continue to send and receive emails and access email archives within Outlook in the event of any Microsoft Exchange server downtime.”

According to Downie, the switch to Mimecast has been swift and painless. “Having run the Black Spider and Mimecast solutions side-by-side for a period, the transition to the new web-based service is now complete,” he said. “Mimecast has agreed to ‘ingest’ all of our PST files onto its system to provide us with a complete, easy to access, indelible archive. Moving this duplicate storage to an external provider will save us significant money on infrastructure and management time and the fact that it will all be stored in multiple and secure datacentres offers us complete peace of mind.”

About Mimecast

Mimecast Services for Microsoft Exchange, Outlook and Windows Mobile provide enterprise level email security, continuity and archiving for any size of company. This 'Unified Email Management' service requires no hardware or software, integrates with an organization’s existing IT, offers complete control to the IT administrator and takes just hours to set up. Every day Mimecast takes care of millions of emails and documents for thousands of companies around the world, with registered Offices in North America, Europe, South Africa, and Offshore. For more information, visit www.mimecast.com.

^{[Formatted by Paul Warren.]}