Denis, one of the world's leading dental claims administrators, has implemented Mimecast's UEM service to improve e-mail hygiene, business continuity and reduce IT costs.
Denis opened its doors in 1996 with basic IT infrastructure, which included POP e-mail and basic backup systems. The growth of the organisation ran apace with the increasing importance of e-mail as the primary communication medium between the claims administrator and its customers.
This meant that in 2007 the company needed to build a more scalable system, and made the move to a Microsoft Exchange Server. Only a few short years later, the Exchange e-mail environment had already become a challenge to manage, particularly with regard to archive and restore functionality. The IT department realised how much risk Denis could be exposed to if there was ever an extended period of e-mail downtime.
“Access to e-mails is critical to the business. On average we receive over 70 000 inbound and send over 75 000 e-mails per month. In 2007, we were still receiving up to 8 000 faxes a week,” says Stanton Johnson, IT Manager at Denis. “This is now down to just 2 000 a week, with the other 6 000 faxes now sent as e-mail. In fact, it's all received as e-mail anyway as we now run on a fax-to-e-mail service.”
The IT team investigated various options and weighed up their costs against their ability to deal with archiving and quicker access to restored data. Options included redesigning certain areas of the IT environment, which would incur additional onsite hardware costs and additional IT processes to deal with the current ones.
“Another challenge was implementing a disaster recovery system. We looked at the cost of another Exchange server at our disaster recovery site at another location, but as you can imagine, the costs were prohibitive. Also, the disaster recovery strategy still didn't address sudden unexpected outages. We realised that we needed business continuity onsite as much, if not more, than a disaster recovery plan, and we needed to speed up and streamline the way old e-mail could be recovered,” explains Johnson.
The Mimecast UEM service offered Denis the security, archiving, compliance and continuity features it needed. “Mimecast was an obvious choice as it takes care of everything. Inbound and outbound email archiving happens before the e-mail has even left the network. It even archives internal mail. We know that our e-mail is compliant, there isn't any panic about viruses entering our infrastructure via e-mail, and our spam levels have dropped significantly,” says Johnson.
The choice to implement Mimecast's software as a service offering, instead of clustering and replicating an Exchange environment in the disaster recovery space, has saved Denis a significant amount of money. Another area of cost saving comes from Mimecast's bottomless e-mail inbox.
“Cost isn't the only benefit, and from my perspective, it isn't even the most important. It's continuity. Our business still has full 24/7 access to e-mail even in the event of an internal mail server error. From both a service delivery and support perspective, implementing the Mimecast service has been incredible. We can now manage the quality of the Denis e-mail system in terms of archiving, restoring data, on and off site continuity, and its ability to retrieve e-mail and sort through quarantine folders. We don't worry about the next virus attack,” says Johnson. “We can now spend our time on business rather than the usual mundane administration tasks.”
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