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Law firm gets SaaSy with email security
Case study: How Ashurst LLP has barred spam

By Tim Ferguson

Published: Tuesday 15 July 2008

International law firm Ashurst LLP has turned to web-based email management to help drastically reduce spam and free up time for its tech team.

Ashurst has been using technology from email management specialist Mimecast to manage its Microsoft Exchange and Outlook applications.

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Mimecast provides email quarantining and, since implementation six months ago, the majority of spam has been blocked before it even enters the law firm's network.

Ashurst previously used an in-house system but the decision was taken to move to the software as a service approach to reduce the burden on the IT department.

Previously, a significant amount of time was being spent on inspecting spam and email that had been quarantined, impacting productivity.

Speaking to silicon.com, IT systems manager at Ashurst, Paolo Picone, said: "It became apparent that we were spending more time than perhaps was efficient actually dealing with those issues rather than actually concentrating on the job in hand of developing our internal systems and managing those."

He added: "One of the things I was trying to get away from was having the need to have those valuable people that I have in my team dealing with this type of stuff - and putting a service in such as Mimecast has got away from that."

But in addressing the problem, Ashurst also wanted to retain the amount of control over the most critical customer communication channel.

Picone said: "One of the reasons we had not looked at a managed solution before was the lack of granularity in control over what you could allow in and what you couldn't allow in."

Another benefit of the Mimecast tech has been the ability to retain and archive email for 10 years - meaning the firm complies with data retention regulations and can provide an audit trail on who's accessed the information.

Picone said Mimecast was one of the few providers that could deliver this kind of data integrity, adding the firm's email data would "stand up to scrutiny" should the need ever arise.

Security benefits have included the retention of data in the UK - something clients were keen for - and encryption of all emails between Ashurst and Mimecast.

Picone said: "It very quickly became apparent that [using Mimecast] was going to take a big headache away from us. It did change my perception of these kinds of services being managed."