Affinity Credit Union Turns to Mimecast to Stave Off Increasing Volume of Phishing Attacks
Affinity Credit Union is the eighth-largest credit union in Canada, with 56 locations and 750 employees.
Solution
- Mimecast Secure Email Gateway Targeted Threat Protection
- Email Continuity
Benefit
- Affinity will soon migrate to Office 365 – with no worries about email security or continuity, thanks to Mimecast, during or after the transition. The company will soon begin sending secure email with Mimecast, and is evaluating Mimecast’s archiving and related services to address their email retention needs
Challenge
As the volume of phishing attacks against Affinity Credit Union grew, EVP and CIO Michael Elchuk knew he had to make a change.
The company’s two on-premises email security appliances were not up to the task of staving off increasingly sophisticated phishing techniques.
His IT team was spending hours per week on manual workarounds and interventions, and blocking more than was necessary, creating false positives – which led to more support tickets and more manual work.
“We were doing a lot of one-off hacks,” he recalls. “And that shouldn’t be the case.”
Solution
Elchuk consulted with Gartner, and they recommended Mimecast, which provides a cloud-based service for email management and security.
The Mimecast service would enable Affinity to sandbox and scan attachments, offer self-service user quarantines, automatically encrypt email, and provide enhanced security awareness training for employees.
Importantly, because it’s fully cloud based, the Mimecast Continuity Service would also ease Affinity’s planned migration to Office 365.
“Mimecast is very focused on email and doing one thing really well, instead of doing a lot of things not so well. The feature set is very rich –Mimecast provides everything we need to keep our email secure.”
Michael Elchuk - EVP and CIO, Affinity Credit Union
Summary
Since Affinity implemented Mimecast, Elchuk reports that the volume of spam has been reduced by 75 percent, and his team is spending many hours less per week on email management than ever before.
Affinity has found the Mimecast sandboxing with TTP Attachment Protect to be highly accurate – much more accurate than the IT team’s manual reviews – and they now let the Mimecast service make the call on whether or not an attachment is malicious.
As a result, the company is seeing far fewer attacks make it through, and far fewer support tickets related to email. Users are very happy, and even Affinity’s CEO has mentioned how much he likes the daily spam digest that he and all users receive.