EDF chooses cloud-based solution for managing e-mail

The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) wanted to reduce the complexity and recurring hardware and administration costs associated with e-mail management. The non-profit organization, with 400 scientists and attorneys in 10 different offices, had relied on inefficient systems in the past and decided on a new route--a cloud-based e-mail security system from Mimecast.

EDF’s CIO Brian Attas, says, "The solution greatly simplifies our overall e-mail environment and gives me peace of mind. Any organization that wants to get out of the business of archiving and managing e-mail security should look at Mimecast."

Mimecast reported recently that with its solution, the EDF saw an immediate improvement in overall e-mail performance, anti-virus coverage, policy enforcement and compliance. The latter two are of particular importance to Attas and his team because EDF employees create large volumes of unstructured data quickly.

Attas says, "Mimecast is a tremendous help for record-keeping and e-discovery. If we have to find archived messages, it literally takes less than a minute to set up and execute a search."

EDF users also like the business continuity feature of Mimecast. Attas explains, "In the past, if we had a power or server outage at both of our main hub locations, there would not have been access to e-mail, even from home. Now e-mail fails over to Mimecast in that event, which provides a Web-based interface, which looks just like the user’s inbox, to enable our users to continue working and keep outages invisible to the outside world."