Rugby Football League
The UK’s Rugby Football League Wins Security Scrum with Mimecast
Solution
- Email Security with Targeted Threat Protection
- Cloud Archive
- Email Continuity
- Awareness Training
Problem
- When COVID-19 hit and workers had to head home, the RFL needed to keep functioning normally to steer the sport through uniquely challenging times – for example in ensuring the resumption of the Super League and Challenge Cup competitions through late summer and autumn
Benefit
- Integration with MS 365 delivers superior email security and continuity
- Awareness training is an invaluable tool for the work-from-home phenomenon
- Stops attacks before they can spread
Customer Vision
There may not be fans in the stands, and scrums and huddles have been temporarily suspended, but the UK’s Rugby Football League (RFL) is moving full steam ahead through the COVID-19 pandemic.
As the national governing body for Rugby League in the UK, keeping the games on the field (and on TVs) has been especially important in 2020 for so many reasons, not least in ensuring the sport has been able to fulfil broadcast contracts with Sky and the BBC.
The RFL’s Head of Technology, Matthew Dews, was the man responsible for keeping the RFL up and running when the pandemic hit and everyone in their two head offices abruptly relocated. Because he took a cloud strategy for email security and archiving with Mimecast, the sudden transition to work-at-home was a non-issue from an email continuity perspective.
“Mimecast is very efficient at stopping attacks—it gives us the message ID and within 10 seconds we’ve put an end to it.”
Matthew Dews- Head of Technology, Rugby Football League
“The company just kept on functioning with everyone working from home,” Matthew says. “We were well prepared across the board –the only thing special we had to do was to buy four laptops for employees who didn’t have them.”
Customer Strategy
Matthew is a long-time Mimecast customer—the RFL initially started by using Mimecast for archiving 12 years ago, and added email security, email continuity and awareness training as new needs arose.
Customer Outcome
When all 150 of the RFL’s email users shifted to work-from-home in the early spring of 2020, the need to secure endpoints became more critical than ever for Matthew. As part of this, employee education is paramount, since employees are more likely to engage in risky email and online behaviour at home than they are in the office.
Matthew says Mimecast Awareness Training has been very useful in promoting safer remote work habits. “User awareness has become really important in this environment, because people using their own networks makes things harder to secure,” he says. "With Mimecast Awareness Training, we send a nice, sharp video to everyone once a month, with a different topic each time.” Matthew says he also conducts regular phishing tests and is able to identify the employees who need extra attention based on the results.
More than anything, Matthew appreciates how quickly Mimecast enables him to identify and remediate email security issues. “Mimecast is very efficient at stopping attacks—it gives us the message ID and within 10 seconds we’ve put an end to it,” he says. “This is really important because you can shut down attacks before they impact others, which not only makes us more secure; it also saves an enormous amount of time.”