More Than $6 Billion Under Management, Prospect Capital Relies on Mimecast for Email Security.

Background

Al Faella has a big job. He’s Chief Technology Officer of Prospect Capital, a publicly traded private debt and equity manager with $6.4 billion of assets under management.

Faella and Chief Information Security Officer Steven Elliott are responsible for keeping Prospect’s technology infrastructure up and running for its investment professionals and employees. Email has always been a mission-critical technology for Prospect; countless interactions leading to investments and liquidity events have been conducted over email. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020 and the entire company moved to the work-from-home model, the criticality of email hit new heights.

“We’re an email-centric organization, and nobody was expecting what happened when COVID-19 hit,” Faella says. “Prospect empowers us to succeed and invests in infrastructure and services that enable us to be prepared when the unexpected hits – even something as unexpected as COVID-19.”

Customer Vision

When Faella and Elliott first chose Mimecast as their email security partner, they were using Exchange 2010 for email, and Trend Micro as their email security provider.

“It’s really important to have a gold-standard of support from our vendors. I can’t speak highly enough of the Mimecast support team and the quality of documentation.” 

Al Faella - CTO, Prospect Capital Management

“When we migrated to Mimecast, we were looking for a more cutting-edge and granular product with an enterprise-level support team,” Faella says. “The level of excellence of support has been one of our greatest leverage points from our investment in Mimecast. We can always get help when we need it, and every call we’ve ever had with them has had a quick response and positive result.”

Faella also spoke highly of Mimecast’s community site and documentation. “When we cut over from on-premise Exchange to Exchange Online, Mimecast’s documentation told us everything that needed to be done. All it took was a 10 minute follow-up phone call and we were done,” Faella says.

Customer Strategy

Faella says that Mimecast’s defense-in-depth approach to email security and overall flexibility won the day when it came time to perform a messaging gateway and spam filter migration.

“The more you use Mimecast, the more you realize what you can do with it,” he says. “We are able to deploy multiple layers of impersonation protection and anti-spoofing protection as we mature with the product, and, the level of granularity with policies lets us do things we just couldn’t do before.”

Faella says Mimecast’s configurability and visualized reporting enables him and Elliott to create policies that enforce a heightened level of email protection that they deem standard.

“We don’t have the capacity to assign a staff member to manage email security all day – so the breadth and configurability of Mimecast’s policies enables us to really lock down our access list. It serves us very well,” he says. “The other great thing is, Mimecast data visualizations make it really easy to identify areas in need of improvement, so we can further adjust our policies to strengthen those areas.”

Also, as a publicly traded financial services organization, Prospect Capital must comply with a variety of federal regulations and email retention laws. Mimecast eases these requirements with its secure and fully indexed cloud archive.

Customer Outcome

Naturally, people tend to not focus on anything IT-related until something goes wrong. And when something does go wrong … watch out! Thankfully, with Mimecast he hasn’t had any “watch out!” moments. “Mimecast runs without interruption – it’s much more reliable than previous products in its space,” he says. “And our people have been very happy with the whole Mimecast ecosystem. It’s very intuitive and easy to use – which for them, is every bit as important as reliability.”

And for him and Elliott, they know Mimecast’s service organization is there for them whenever they need help.

“We have the keys to the kingdom – people rely on us to keep the infrastructure healthy and secure,” Faella says. “It’s really important to have a gold-standard of support from our vendors. I can’t speak highly enough of the Mimecast support team and the quality of documentation. From our perspective, the quality of support is just as important as the quality of product, and Mimecast has delivered on both fronts.”