Bird and Bird Flies High with Mimecast
Solution
- Mimecast Email Security with Targeted Threat Protection
- Mimecast Mailbox Continuity
- Mimecast Cloud Archive
Problem
Bird & Bird was facing an increasing volume and variety of email-borne threats, including spam, spear-phishing and impersonation attacks. The company also faced email continuity, recovery and compliance challenges.
Customer Vision
Bird & Bird is an international law firm with more than 3,000 employees, across 30 offices in 21 countries. Email is the firm’s primary mode of communication, and Jon Spencer, Head of Infrastructure at Bird & Bird, is devoted to protecting the company’s employees from email-based threats, in turn securing confidential, client information.
Customer Strategy
Spencer first contacted Mimecast in 2010 to address the increasing level of spam landing in employees’ inboxes and to ensure email continuity across all Bird & Bird offices. “We had the MessageLabs email security service in place, but with the growing volume and variety of threats targeting our business, we needed a more robust, feature rich solution. Mimecast was the market leader, and the decision to switch was simple.”
Mimecast Email Security quickly helped Bird & Bird solve the spam problem. Additionally, Bird & Bird implemented Mimecast Mailbox Continuity to ensure “always on” email during Exchange maintenance windows, office moves, and a series of mergers and expansions. With Mimecast, employees always have access to email, no email data is lost, and security policies are consistently applied at all stages.
There isn’t a more important system within Bird & Bird than email, and Mimecast keeps it – and our entire firm – safe from email-borne threats.
Jon Spencer, Head of Infrastructure, Bird & Bird
Given the success it had with Mimecast Email Security and Mimecast Mailbox Continuity, in 2011, Bird & Bird added Mimecast Cloud Archive to meet regulatory retention requirements, ensure email continuity in the event of system downtime, and recover individual messages.
Spencer comments: “Before Mimecast, if a user deleted an email, we’d have to scramble to find the tape the email was on. Now, we can quickly and easily pull emails from our archive and ship them to end users. Since deploying Mimecast Cloud Archive, we haven’t had to do a single Exchange restore.”
Customer Outcome
More recently, Bird & Bird chose to add Mimecast Email Security with Targeted Threat Protection (TTP) to better defend against spear-phishing, impersonation, and other targeted email attacks.
“First we saw an influx of malicious attachments, which then evolved to malicious links within the message body, and more recently, attachments with embedded links , password-protected documents and compromised accounts,” says Spencer. “Impersonation attacks, particularly emails claiming to be from C-level executives, were also increasing.”
Spencer continues: “Recognizing the need for stronger email security, in 2015, we decided to run Mimecast Email Security with TTP in evaluation mode. At that time, a number of our offices were being heavily targeted with crypto-malware which resulted in us accelerating the live TTP deployment. Mimecast protected our users from the targeted attacks, and has continued to offer high levels of protection ever since.”
“Mimecast not only protects our internal users, it also plays a fundamental role in protecting our clients. An increasing number are insisting on enforced TLS in order to guarantee the security of their confidential data during transmission, the Mimecast platform makes the setup and management of this both quick and easy.”