Haynes International

Haynes International is one of the world’s largest developers, manufacturers, and distributors of high performance nickel- and cobalt-based alloys for use in high-temperature and corrosion applications. The company has nearly 400 email users

Challenge

Haynes International wanted to replace its on-premise anti-spam / anti-virus appliance with a solution that would block messages at the gateway. The company was also keen to update its archiving and retrieval capabilities, which involved searching multiple NAS devices (each of which had to be physically located and mounted in order to complete a search), meaning searches could span hours or even days. Finally, Haynes wished to implement a business continuity solution to ensure email was always available, even in the rare event of an Exchange server outage.

Solution

Haynes implemented Mimecast, which blocks unwanted email, including security threats, at the gateway, and now effectively blocks nearly 70 percent of all incoming email (mostly identified as spam) from ever entering the network.

Archiving is also greatly improved, with all email available in the cloud. “Mimecast offers a seven-second search SLA,” says Shelly Morris, Global Systems Security Administrator for Haynes. “That’s a far cry from the hours or days it used to take us to retrieve email, and with Mimecast we know our searches are complete andaccurate.” Most searches are conducted by the users themselves and require no IT involvement.

Haynes Vice President and CIO Jeff Young says that Mimecast’s business continuity features bring the IT team peace of mind. Now, in the event of a server outage, email fails over to Mimecast. Email management overall is greatly streamlined with Mimecast, says Morris: “It’s so much simpler now – it’s all in one place. Before, email management consumed a lot of my time.” But security is perhaps the biggest benefit of Mimecast, says Young. “Cyber security wasn’t a big concern when we originally implemented Mimecast in 2013, but now it’s a Board-level issue,” he says. “Mimecast gives us comfort on that front – we have fewer virus and email security problems now than we did 10 years ago, even though the number of threats out there has risen exponentially during that time.”

Summary

The amount of overall traffic on the Haynes International network is down by nearly 70 percent as spam and unwanted email are effectively blocked, the IT team can now retrieve email in seconds instead of days, and Mimecast’s business continuity features.

“I’ve been at Haynes since 1980 and I’ve brought in a lot of products. It’s rare that you put a product in that has this much benefit. Mimecast is one of the top 5 investments I’ve made here. It works everyday - we can always count on it."

Jeff Young - Vice President and CIO, Haynes International