Bidvest Bank Implements Email Archiving with Mimecast

Mimecast Provides Bidvest Bank With Reliable Email Archiving While Ensuring Superior Email Management.

Context

Bidvest Bank Limited is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Bidvest Group Limited, an international trading and services JSE-listed company that operates on three continents.

Bidvest Bank has been involved in foreign exchange in Southern Africa for over 150 years and focuses on all major currencies through a correspondent global network. In July 2007 The Bidvest Group announced the name change of its specialist banking business, Rennies Bank Limited, to Bidvest Bank Limited.

In addition to its corporate and regional offices, Bidvest Bank has a network of over 100 retail branches nationwide. In a dispersed corporate environment such as this, consistent uptime and reduced complexity within IT substructures such as email services is vital.

The Challenge

Reliable email systems that provide for adequate archival and seamless business continuity are of the utmost importance to all financial services businesses. For Bidvest Bank, a robust email archiving system and guaranteed access to email were major drivers in the decision to implement Mimecast.

“There are a number of reasons why we went with Mimecast; most important of these is that fact that their platform allowed for better management and greater flexibility in managing and monitoring our emails closely,” says Russell Fogg, Chief Information Officer at Bidvest Bank.

South Africa has just had the third iteration of the King report that defines the duties of all corporates to mitigate risk and implement best practice controls across the enterprise. This global and local move towards tighter regulation and compliance meant that providing an email environment where corporate governance risks are reliably mitigated is vital to Bidvest Bank.

In addition to these high-level strategic email management needs, BidvestBank had numerous policies for day-to-day email usage, ranging from who can send and receive images to content filtering and file extension limitations.

The organisation knew from the outset that being compliant meant watertight policies as files and attachments consume bandwidth and certain topics and language are inappropriate for corporate email.

The Solution

The ten-year bottomless archiving of email was a key consideration when selecting the Mimecast solution. Bidvest Bank needed a compliant and immutable email archiving solution which would allow immediate access to data, should it be required.

Furthermore, Mimecast’s cloud-based delivery model equipped Bidvest Bank with always available email services without the need for deploying complex infrastructure.

“Email is the primary tool for all communications inside and outside the organisation so email uptime was really important for us. We also wanted to be able to manage our email more effectively and have better control of it,” adds Fogg.

Consistent uptime is one of the hallmarks of Mimecast.  By enabling access to email regardless of whether on premise communication infrastructure is functional, Mimecast has ensured that Bidvest Bank does not experience unnecessary downtime or reduced productivity.

During a continuity event Mimecast provides a plethora of tools to access new email, these range from an outlook interface a web portal and even mobile services such as the iPad.

The Benefits

When asked how Mimecast was selected, Fogg explained: “We looked at our options and saw that Mimecast has a more refined and far more mature offering than anything else offered on the market. We are also highly impressed with the pre and post implementation support we received from them.”

Bidvest Bank’s decision to apply Mimecast to its email infrastructure afforded it the capability to accurately search and recall legacy communications at any time, strengthening the organisation’s capacity to monitor business dealings.

“We are very impressed with both the technology and how Mimecast implemented the solution in a phased approach. Everything was documented every step of way. Our people didn’t even realise we were busy,” concludes Fogg.