Case Study

    Postman Pat API Speeds Up Tasks For Mimecast

    Time is of the Essence: Postman Pat API Speeds Up Tasks For Mimecast

    Solution

    • Internal teams within Mimecast developed the Postman Pat API, which has reduced the time it takes to build out policies from days, to just seconds in some cases

    Problem

    • The professional services team needed a time saving tool to help streamline the process of manually building out complex policies

    Benefit

    • Significantly cuts the time for professional services team members to build out policies
    • These time savings speed up the process of customer implementation
    • Postman Pat has the potential to be expanded in the future to help speed up migrations and other projects

    The Mimecast team prides itself on tailoring email security solutions to fit each customer’s needs. However, this level of attention takes time to execute properly – and in the business of detecting and protecting against today’s most sophisticated email threats, time is everything.

    “Any tool that can give us back time in our day is enabling us to work on other projects and other aspects of a customer’s email security solution to harden or improve defenses,” says Justin Kidwell, a Senior Professional Service Consultant at Mimecast.

    Vision 

    At Mimecast, the professional services team manually builds out policies for individual customer accounts – policies such as Anti-Spoofing, DKIM Signing and Anti-Spoofing SPF based Bypass that could take several hours to create. “If a single customer has 50, 60 or even 100 domains, we could spend two, four or even six hours working on those policies. It’s quite a tedious process,” Kidwell says.

    That’s when a former Mimecaster on the team decided there had to be a better way – a way to speed up the process of building out policies and freeing up valuable time. And when he realized that tool didn’t exist, he built one.

    Strategy

    The result was an original API called Postman Pat. And its main goal was to solve the time crunch professional services team members were facing when building out those tedious policies.

    “Postman Pat streamlines this whole process. A new policy that used to take a few hours to create now only takes a couple of seconds,” says Kidwell. “It’s a very basic tool at its core, but this API is making a massive impact.”

    “The big difference is, with Postman Pat I can spend a day building out complex configurations, which was a three-to-four-day process before the tool was created,” Kidwell says. “Postman Pat is a very powerful tool that saves us a lot of time in getting the configuration just right so that we can get to validating, testing and, ultimately, implementing much faster.”

    Outcome 

    The Postman Pat API delivered time-saving benefits immediately. “I’m currently working on several accounts that each have a huge number of email domains,” says Kidwell. “If I were to manually create policies for each one, it would take several hours, or even days. With Postman Pat, it takes me about a few seconds.”

    But the professional services and API teams believe they’ve only scratched the surface of the tool’s full potential. Currently only in use by a select number of teams within Mimecast, the hope is to one day expand use to the broader Service Delivery team soon. And they remain hopeful for an even wider launch in the future.

    “Right now, Postman Pat is being used by Mimecast teams in several regions, but we’re hoping to expand it globally soon,” says Kidwell. “Eventually, our long-term goal is to make Postman Pat available outside of Mimecast so that other teams facing the same time constraints can realize its benefits. While still in its early stages of development, the future of Postman Pat is bright.

    “Postman Pat streamlines this whole process. A new policy that used to take a few hours to create now only takes a couple of seconds.”

    Justin Kidwell, Senior Professional Service Consultant at Mimecast

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