Europcar Achieves King 3 Compliance with Mimecast

Context

Europcar is one of South Africa’s leading carrental agencies. The company has been active forover 30 years and operates from 120 locations across South Africa, Namibia, Botswana, Lesothoand Swaziland.

Its fleet of over 16,000 vehicles caters to a varietyof customer needs which include both short and long term rental, chauffeured transportation, transfers and van rental.

Owned and managed by the Imperial Group,a prominent South African industrial servicesand retail based organisation, Europcar enjoys a wide network of support and was recently deemed the country’s leading car hire agency in the 2011 World Travel Awards for the sixth consecutive year.

“Mimecast’s platform has offered Europcar a solution to a number of challenges within a single integrated packages.”

Shaun Phillips - General Manager, IT Infrastructure & Operations, Europcar South Africa

Challenge 

Due to the logistical nature of Europcar’s business model, a reliable and robust email delivery system is crucial to its success.

“Our customers frequently use email to log queries. Furthermore, our reservation confirmation and invoice systems rely entirely on email based services. Availability and 100% uptime is absolutely essential,” comments Shaun Phillips, general manager, IT Infrastructure & Operations for Europcar South Africa.

For this reason, Europcar required an approach to email which ensured continuous delivery to over 700 active accounts.

Furthermore, the company sought out a platform which would enable compliance with the King III report and related legislation. Key to this was the need for a broader and more dependable email archiving solution which also offered comprehensive security to the user.

In addition, Europcar required Microsoft Exchange migration support and seamless integration with the platform within its email infrastructure.

Solution

In order to meet these needs, Europcar commissioned Mimecast to apply its offering to the organisation’s email strata.

The platform offers consistent email delivery via automatic service failover and failback engines which operate in near real time – offering Europcar peace of mind in the event of an email outage.

Mimecast also incorporates a comprehensive archiving solution which enables greater compliance by giving users instant access to every mail sent or received within the organization. This afforded Europcar the ability to comply with South African corporate governance standards while lightening the load off its Microsoft Exchange server.

Furthermore, Mimecast offers a broad security solution backed by strict SLAs and flexible email encryption options – cutting the cost of implementing additional security features within Europcar’s email infrastructure while reducingoverall complexity.

Finally, Mimecast offers seamless integration with Microsoft Exchange and support for Exchange migration via a comprehensive guidance structure which is available to clients.

Benefits

Mimecast’s platform has offered Europcar a solution to a number of challenges within a single integrated package. Thus far, the company has benefitted from the reliability of the platform while enjoying the reduction in cost and complexity associated with its archiving and security offerings.

In addition, Europcar has also made use of Mimecast’s email branding solution.

For now, says Mr Phillips, the organisation has fulfilled all of its core requirements through the implementation of Mimecast and does not see any immediate need for further improvement of its email infrastructure.