Cushman & Wakefield Locks Down Prime Real Estate with Mimecast Email Protection

At A Glance

• Cushman & Wakefield is a global commercial real estate services firm with approximately 50,000 employees in over 400 offices and 60 countries

The cloud is where it’s at for the Cushman & Wakefield information security team. “We are a cloud-first, partner-first organization,” says Erik Hart, Chief Information Security Officer at Cushman & Wakefield. “We don’t want the burden of managing servers. If you grow or shrink – you’re stuck with that same infrastructure, which may not always be what you need.”

With email being the global commercial real estate company’s primary form of communication, it must be protected at all costs. “Email presents the largest risk for threats like phishing, and with more people working remotely than ever before, it’s even more critical to protect our email communications,” Hart says. “That’s why we turned to Mimecast for help.”

Customer Vision 

Hart’s information security team required a solution that would go a step further than just monitoring email. “We needed a way to make sure good emails get delivered and bad emails don’t hit an employee’s inbox,” says Chan Amarasingha, Cushman & Wakefield’s Platform Architect for Messaging.

“Email presents the largest risk for threats like phishing, and with more people working remotely than ever before, it’s even more critical to protect our email communications. That’s why we turned to Mimecast for help. ”

Erik Hart, Chief Information Security Officer at Cushman & Wakefield

On-demand support is critical. “Our global platform is often changing through mergers and acquisitions. We need partners that can scale with us and stay flexible – that are just a phone call away whenever we have to add users to the system,” says Hart. Mimecast was the company that emerged with the best support to meet Cushman & Wakefield’s needs.

Customer Strategy

Once Cushman & Wakefield’s information security team members looked into Mimecast, they knew they had the right tools in their hands, and a match for their cloud-first vision. “Mimecast just fits right in. You really manage it more toward IT applications and service offerings, not the hardware behind it,” Hart says.

The Cushman & Wakefield team uses a combination of Mimecast products to meet its information security needs, including an application programming interface (API) to assist in onboarding and offboarding employees, and Internal Email Protect (IEP). “Mimecast IEP provides a quickway to identify a suspicious email and delete it,” says Amarasingha. “And if an email turns out to be a false positive, we can quickly restore the deleted message.”

Customer Outcome

Years into their partnership, Cushman & Wakefield continues to rely on Mimecast for information security innovation. “We’re now using DMARC Analyzer to see who is receiving emails from our brand and can use that information to identify partners or threats,” says Amarasingha. “DMARC recently helped us diagnose a marketing tool issue with email delivery problems that could have prevented converting prospects into clients.”

From a merger and acquisitions perspective, rebranding companies and adding email users is less of a burden with Mimecast. “Yes, there’s planning that needs to happen with a rebrand, but Mimecast is able to tell us ‘this is what needs to happen, this is what you need to do.’ Mimecast takes care of the back-end infrastructure,” says Hart.

For Amarasingha and his team, partnering with Mimecast has made a positive difference in managing thousands of email accounts around the globe. “A product can be let down by bad support. Mimecast has our back – that really adds value to their service.”