Messaging News - December 2008 - (Page 13) Mary Kay Roberto, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Mimecast U.S. it could handle. Miles & Stockbridge has a simple retention policy: keep everything forever. Scalability was not an option for Adams concerning the company’s email archive; his policy is to archive everything, all the time. The next program he tried was a step up in capacity, but presented a limitation in stubbing—a process which captures email attachments and replaces them with a stub file or link so hefty documents do not take up too much disk space (being in the legal field most Miles & Stockbridge documents are of exceptional size). Sometimes stubbing frees up disk space, but causes sluggish Exchange server performance. Adams tried another program to circumvent the stubbing issue and it provided excellent performance on email archiving, but fell short of the business continuance benefits he needed. A third pain point was with the hosted solutions he used for anti-virus, anti-spam and malware filtering. Several different applications limited the capacity of his email storage, creating a mount- mail store in eight offices required a change in this CIO’s hosting philosophy, thus Adams embarked on an initiative to retain more holistic technology outside of the firm. A Low-Cost Solution In his customary fashion, Adams came across Mimecast Unified Email Management in the habit of researching continual improvement for the firm’s email management needs. Aware that cloud-based computing—using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to deliver IT applications in the “cloud”—could eliminate costly infrastructure, along with storage limitations, management time, and ongoing maintenance costs, Adam’s was drawn to Mimecast’s solution. SaaS is custom fit for companies like Miles & Stockbridge as it reduces overhead and power consumption, in addition to floor space and the need to train and retain IT staff. “Mimecast provided the services of three or four different products in one SaaS Reduces Complexity in Email Administration, While Reducing Cost A Case in Point M iles & Stockbridge is a preferred law firm for Fortune 500 industry, major financial institutions, private businesses and not-for-profits in the community of Baltimore, Washington, and Northern Virginia. CIO Ken Adams manages information systems for eight offices, running multiple disparate Microsoft Exchange information stores, along with the intrinsic security, continuity, information management and policy keeping. Four different applications provided solutions for the firms’ IT needs, all running in house, side-byside, but not in sync. With a corporate culture based on integrity and excellence, Miles & Stockbridge needed to upgrade the integrity, excellence and utility of its mail store. The Rising Cost of In-House Email Solutions Each one of the IT applications Adams was using provided one or two features, but no single application addressed all of his email pain points. In one case, their archiving package was limited by the amount of email ing problem for his save-everythingforever information policy. Adams had to purchase and install each one of these applications in order to evaluate them. It was not until he had invested the money and time to get a new application running that he learned where it thrived and where it fell short. The man hours required to install, run, evaluate and update these disparate IT solutions was draining the resources of his modest IT staff. Human resources are much more costly than hardware and in any field where IT is not the company’s core competency, this creates a dangerous imbalance. The dollar value on a team member rises exponentially based on tenure and trust, which lands a lot of the IT responsibility in a law firm on the CIO. “You can’t put a general tech in charge of everybody’s email,” Adams states, referring to the delicate nature of communications in a litigious environment. “Getting the responsibility off my plate was huge.” Also, the money required to host a bottomless solution,” Adams reports, who employed Mimecast to handle archiving, continuity, security and storage. The dollar savings on the software alone was a 50 percent improvement at least, but this was second to the amount of administration time Adams saves. “The management of those four different programs alone was more costly to my department than the money I spent in licensing. Just the indexing alone is a full time job. When one application crashes, it takes days to rebuild. The same goes for document management, with Mimecast there is nothing for me to manage.” SaaS is usually rapid to deploy. Once Adams selected Mimecast, he had it fully operational within 48 hours. “It’s kind of like buying a car,” he laughs, “When you find the one you want, you want to drive away with it. I believe we saw the demo and I made the decision that night.” TMP Source: Mimecast messagingnews.com 13 http://www.messagingnews.com
For optimal viewing of this digital publication, please enable JavaScript and then refresh the page. If you would like to try to load the digital publication without using Flash Player detection, please click here.