The wine industry is known for vines, long discussions about the weather and the clinking of glasses. What it's not known for is its secrets and its e-mail. In fact, it is has a lot of both.
Just like the rest of the corporate world, international exporter of leading South African wines, DGB - known for famous wine and spirit brands like Boschendal, St Augustine, Tall House, Nordic Ice and Tango Sour Apple - identified disaster recovery, business continuity, e-mail archiving and data leak protection as areas where the IT department should be able to mitigate any risk to the company.
The company had experienced e-mail downtime, and the resultant loss of business due to DGB's primary trading tool being unavailable, for both local and international orders, was significant.
Marco de Villiers, Group IT manager at DBG, and his team chose Mimecast unified e-mail management (UEM) as the right solution of the 16-branch, 240-user organisation.
“We played around with the service and got really excited when we realised the potential. This wasn't your run of the mill e-mail archiving solution. It was an integrated, complete e-mail solution and answered all the needs we had, as well as some we hadn't thought of yet,” says de Villiers.
“We are using most of the feature set at the moment and finding real value in the archiving and search functionality. The Outlook plug-in relieves the IT team of a lot of desktop support calls, which used to take up an inordinate amount of time. Now, when there is a problem with Exchange, our users don't know the difference between working on the server or working via Mimecast's data centres. The users are generally not aware that they are working on a Mimecast solution at all, to be honest. All they know is that there are fewer e-mail hassles than ever before. I hate to use the clich'e - but it's a seamless, effortless solution,” he says.
DGB's data leak protection project has begun with promising results. “I know the wine industry may not appear to be a place of industrial espionage activity - and mostly it's not - but we all have our intellectual property and work hard to protect it. As with most cases, it's carelessness rather than malicious intent that leads to sensitive information leaving the business,” says de Villiers. “But intention aside, its the IT department's job to reduce this as far as humanly and technologically possible.”
The next project will be to implement e-mail branding in all company communication. This is a good marketing opportunity as well as one that we may not have considered were we not using the Mimecast service,” concludes de Villiers.
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