Mimecast Email Archiving Scales Alongside Expanding Bay Club Business

Context

The Bay Club, a rapidly-expanding San Francisco-based hospitality company, relies on Mimecast’s cloud archiving solution not only to complement its Microsoft Office 365 email environment, but because Mimecast can scale alongside its growth.

Through a large-scale acquisition, the Bay Club doubled in size in 2015, jumping from 12 active lifestyle clubs to 24, from the Bay Area to Los Angeles and San Diego. The Bayaz Club now has approximately 2,000 email users. “But that number could double again in 2016,” said Mark Street, the Bay Club’s IT Director.

Two years ago, the Bay Club migrated from on-premises email to Office 365. The company did this for greater flexibility, ease of management, and the ability to “deleverage” physical hardware.

But perhaps most importantly, the company needed an email system that could easily grow along with them.

Because of the Bay Club’s potential for further accelerated growth, Street and his team required cloud services that could scale. That led the Bay Club to Office 365 and—eventually—Mimecast.

“We want to be able to expand in large jumps, and to do that easily, going to Office 365 was part of the strategy,” Street said. “Onboarding was easy, as was pulling in other systems to retain any existing data.”

The Bay Club identified about 1,000 active email users who could benefit from an email archiving solution, and in 2014, began evaluating a replacement for its existing on-premises email archiving solution. That on-premises solution did more copying than archiving, Street said, which had potential for serious problems.

“We didn’t want to run into a scenario where, if someone was doing something they shouldn’t via email, they could delete it and we lose that record if we’re not archiving correctly,” Street said.

Easing Cloud Archiving with Mimecast

After conducting an evaluation, the solution that best met the Bay Club’s criteria was Mimecast’s Enterprise Information Archiving solution.

Street was most attracted to Mimecast’s cloud platform, its seamless integration into Office 365, its easy-to-use Web interface for both configuration and administration, and its scalability.

“The primary reason Mimecast was good for us were the hooks into Office 365, and the fact it is a Software as a Service-based product,” Street said. “Mimecast matches our strategic goals of being able to expand easily with a minimal amount of administration.”

Street was able to set up the Mimecast email archiving solution in about an hour. With Mimecast, administrators can search archived email data with ease. The Bay Club also benefits by not having all its eggs in one basket for email archiving.

“Not having our email archived within the same email system is important, because if something catastrophic goes wrong on [Microsoft’s] end and archives are lost, we wouldn’t have a lot of recourse,” Street said. “We mitigate risk by spreading that across multiple providers.”

As the Bay Club grows, it has “a lot of assurance” that the Mimecast archive will easily integrate with Office 365 and all aspects of its email management system will work together. “We just wanted to get away from siloes,” Street said. “That boxed approach of locking a system in and not being able to have it talk to any other application is dead.”

“Not having our email archived within the same email system is important, because if something catastrophic goes wrong on [Microsoft’s] end and archives are lost, we wouldn’t have a lot of recourse. We mitigate risk by spreading that across multiple providers.”

Mark Street - Information Technology Director, The Bay Club