International law firm Taylor Wessing was anxious to make sure that its email systems remained constantly available to its London-based staff no matter what, so last year it chose to deploy Mimecast’s hosted unified email management service.

“Email to us is the single biggest business-critical application ­ if there was ever a disaster, the most important thing for us is that lawyers could still communicate with each other and their clients,” explained the company’s head of IT operations in the UK, Tim Hyman.

“So when we analysed our existing systems in terms of restoring backups, we wanted to find a business continuity solution for email that would be robust enough to tackle whatever happens.”

Installed 18 months ago, the Mimecast software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform provides protection against spam and viruses, email continuity services, content control and supervision, and large attachment handling.

It was brought in to eventually replace a combination of three other products: MessageLabs store and forward mail solution; MailSweeper, which was used for applying business rules to email; and Cryoserver’s mail archiving product.

The existing systems were used in tandem while Taylor Wessing’s email usage patterns were analysed. Rather than using the heuristic analysis method employed by MessageLabs, Mimecast uses a type of quarantine to build up whitelists of email addresses the customer commonly does business with.

“If you send an email out to somebody it is reasonable to assume you will get a reply, so to cut down on false positives, we let the mail flow through Mimecast for over three months prior to switching over to them,” said Hyman.

“There was perhaps a little bit of an increase in spam at first, but now it has gone the other way. The other benefits were immediately obvious, because users can now continue to work during powercuts over the weekend ­ they can access their account via the web,” said Hyman.

Nor does Taylor Wessing need to worry about expanding its data storage to handle the exponential growth in email traffic it has experienced over the past few years. The company has committed to using the Mimecast service for the next decade, meaning it no longer has to worry about capacity planning.

Hyman was also impressed by Mimecast’s willingness to make minor alterations to the service to accommodate the law firm’s specific needs. “There were a few things that needed changing to suit us and Mimecast proved very keen to match its products to our requirements, mainly on the user interface side. That is refreshing and something we would probably not get from a larger vendor,” he said.

Hyman would not divulge how much Taylor Wessing spent on implementing the Mimecast service, but said it has delivered return on investment (ROI) by allowing the company to consolidate its suppliers and servers.

“None of the traditional alternatives can do it on their own. SunGard and MessageLabs offer a similar solution between them, but you are dealing with two vendors and the cost of using Mimecast represents a significant reduction,” he said.