UK law firm
Shoosmiths has outsourced e-mail management to
software-as-a-service (SaaS) supplier
Mimecast to help it meet demands to store and retrieve
documents to legal standards.
Shoosmiths wanted to reduce its risk of not being able to
provide e-mail evidence in court.
Andrew Downie, infrastructure and operations manager at
Shoosmiths, said the firm needed to ensure it was able to store and
retrieve all e-mails in a tamper-proof way that would be acceptable
as evidence in court.
"Courts take a dim view of any organisation that is unable to
provide proof of business correspondence," he said.
Mimecast provides Shoosmiths with a ten-year e-mail retention
archive, a continuity service in the event of any Microsoft
Exchange downtime, and security in the form of spam and virus
filtering.
Downie said over a three-year period the SaaS model will save
Shoosmiths 20% on the total cost of ownership of the archiving
software alone.
"Further savings will come from reduced administration costs
because the services are managed externally and from our not having
to buy and administer additional storage as our needs grow," he
said.
Downie said Shoosmiths had chosen Mimecast because it enabled
the firm to continue to benefit from the SaaS model as well as meet
all its e-mail management needs in a single package from a single
supplier.
"SaaS is a good model for e-mail management because it enables
us to separate it from the rest of our IT, but at the same time it
was easy to implement and integrate with our existing e-mail
system," he said.