Posted on 5 May 2009

Johannesburg. 5 May 2009: The wine industry is known for vines, long discussions about the weather and the clinking of glasses.  What it's not known for is its secrets and its email.  In fact, it is has a lot of both.

Just like the rest of the corporate world, International exporter of leading South African wines, DGB (Pty) Ltd ­ known for famous wine and spirit brands like Boschendal, St Augustine, Tall House, Nordic Ice and Tango Sour Apple- identified disaster recovery, business continuity, email archiving and data leak protection as areas where the IT department should be able to mitigate any risk to the company.

The company had experienced email downtime and the resultant loss of business due to DGB¹s primary trading tool being unavailable, for both local and international orders, was significant.

Marco de Villiers, Group IT manager at DBG and his team chose Mimecast unified email management (UEM) as the right solution of the 16 branch, 240 user organization.

"We played around with the service and got really excited when we realized the potential. This wasn¹t your run of the mill email archiving solution. It was an integrated, complete email solution and answered all the needs we had, as well as some we hadn¹t thought of yet," says de Villiers.

"We are using most of the feature set at the moment and finding real value in the archiving and search functionality.  The Outlook plug-in relieves the IT team of a lot of desktop support calls, which used to take up an inordinate amount of time.  Now, when there is a problem with Exchange our users don¹t know the difference between working on the server, or working via Mimecast¹s data centers. The users are generally not aware that they are working on a Mimecast solution at all to be honest. All they know is that there are fewer email hassles than ever before. I hate to use the cliché ­ but it¹s a seamless, effortless solution," he says.

DGB's data leak protection project has begun with promising results.  "I know the wine industry may not appear to be a place of industrial espionage activity ­ and mostly its not ­ but we all have our Intellectual property and work hard to protect it.  As with most cases, its carelessness rather than malicious intent that leads to sensitive information leaving the business," says de Villiers. "But intention aside, its the IT department¹s jobs to reduce this as far as humanly and technologically possible."

The next project will be to implement email branding in all company communication.  This is a good marketing opportunity as well as one that we may not have considered were we not using the Mimecast service,² concludes de Villiers.

 

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