Pharmaceutical Leader Turns to Mimecast after Symantec Sunset

Customer Vision

The 2019 Broadcom acquisition of Symantec caused fundamental changes in how Symantec invests in and supports its products. This raised concerns among many of its email security customers, including one of the world’s most prominent pharmaceutical companies.

Working at warp speed, this industry leader conducted a rapid evaluation of leading email security companies and chose Mimecast as its new partner, based on the quality of its technology and the pace at which it could get the solution deployed.

Customer Strategy

Pharmaceutical companies have significant privacy and data security challenges – ranging from protecting intellectual property, to meeting regulations for patient privacy. Additionally, email is a mission-critical communications tool for far-flung R&D, corporate and sales operations distributed across the globe.

“They were really impressed with the flexibility of our solutions, and how intuitive it was to customize Mimecast to their specific requirements.”

Mimecast Account Team Member

The company had been using Symantec’s email security and data loss prevention products. Following the Broadcom acquisition and subsequent statements about its strategy for Symantec products and customers, the company determined it needed to evaluate other options to “de-risk” its reliance on Symantec. After considering Proofpoint and Mimecast as the “finalists,” the company chose to go with Mimecast email security and targeted threat protection, and DMARC Analyzer and Brand Exploit Detection to protect against brand spoofing.

Oh, and one more detail: they wanted it all deployed to its tens of thousands of users in four weeks.

Customer Outcome

“Their evaluation process was quite rigorous and we had to demonstrate the value of our solutions every step of the way,” said a member of the Mimecast account team. “They were really impressed with the flexibility of our solutions, and how intuitive it was to customize Mimecast to their specific requirements.”

The company also valued the ease of integration with other components of its security infrastructure, including Splunk and Tanium. “Ultimately, they found that with Mimecast, there was a lot more they could do to protect their business than they could with Symantec,” said the account team member.

Once the evaluation was complete and the deal was signed, the deployment clock started ticking for the Mimecast team. To further complicate matters, it was March 2020 when COVID-19 lockdowns were being enforced across the world.

“They needed to change quickly to de-risk their Symantec situation, so they had a hard deadline –and it was right at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, so we had to do it all remotely,” said the account team member. “We made it all happen. The customer told us this was one of the best professional services engagements they’d ever seen – our team worked 12 hours days across time zones, through weekends and holidays, and we were live in four weeks.”