SaaS cuts e-mail archiving costs

A software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution is helping a large law firm reduce its e-mail costs by 33 percent. Fish & Richardson is using Mimecast’s SaaS-based, unified e-mail management to modernize its archiving process. The law firm, which specializes in intellectual property, litigation and corporate law, has more than 425 attorneys and 1,200 staff members in 12 offices worldwide.

Fish & Richardson must keep copies of all its communications to meet archiving and e-discovery best practices. With the old system, when a retrieval request came in, staff searched manually through tapes. The firm also backed up all its e-mail communications weekly, which became increasingly burdensome as volumes and storage costs escalated.

Fish & Richardson principal Nancy Stagg, says, “E-discovery and document retention requirements, combined with increasing volume, make e-mail management difficult for law firms and corporate law departments and their IT staffs. Mimecast provides a comprehensive solution that addresses e-discovery needs, using an intuitive user interface in a simple, SaaS-delivered package.”

Chuck DeMille, director of network infrastructure and security at Fish & Richardson, says, “Mimecast’s archiving features alone were enough to make the business case to subscribe to the service. The powerful capabilities in a SaaS-based solution allow us full control of our e-mail infrastructure and simultaneously to reduce our dependence on on-premise hardware and its associated IT maintenance and administration costs.”

DeMille adds, “Instead of having a separate system that we need to interface with and manage, we replaced three point solutions [anti-spam, e-mail disclaimer management and disaster recovery] with minimal impact on users and improved overall service. You can’t put a price tag on that.”

In a recent press release, Mimecast reports that with its solution, Fish & Richardson was able to reduce its e-mail management costs by 33 percent.