Center Grove Community School Corporation

At A Glance

• Center Grove Community School Corporation: www.centergrove.k12.in.us

Mimecast helps Indiana public school system unite email archiving and spam filtering in the cloud

Manual Discovery Following Legal Requests Proves Time-Consuming

Every time Jason Taylor received a discovery request, he and his staff of network engineers would manually sift through pages of email archives – and 1,500 staff email accounts – to find the specific information desired.

“We are subject to frequent e-discovery requests,” says Taylor, chief technology officer of Center Grove Community School Corporation, a public school system in Indiana serving about 7,700 students across eight campuses. “And so to ease the burdens around finding the information and managing perpetual retention for compliance purposes, we required a single, cloud-based email management platform that offered a secure, accessible email archive.”

Center Grove’s legacy email archiving system only retained emails for three to five years – not nearly far enough back in time. And it had started to falter as it aged – the legacy email archiving system had only been upgraded once in eight years.

Not only that, Center Grove’s on-premise spam filtering solution was limited – users could only access the system when they were on-site. This contributed to not only a poor user experience for employees, but also meant both they and Taylor’s team faced added complexity in protecting Center Grove from spam, malware and data leakage.

School System In Need Of A Single, Email Security Solution

What Taylor needed was a single, multi-purpose, always-on, cloud-based platform to eliminate Center Grove’s labor-intensive email management processes. He was looking for a few key features:

• A scalable, cloud-based, secure email archive service that would provide Center Grove with email and data retention, as well as streamline the e-discovery process and offer built-in redundancy,
• A spam filter feature that would be intuitive for users, and that could be controlled even when they were off-premise, and
• Seamless integration with Microsoft Office 365, to which Center Grove would soon be transitioning over.

Taylor found just the solution in the form of Mimecast’s Email Security suite.

Mimecast Cuts Email Management Time In Half

Taylor and Center Grove’s transition from the point email archiving and spam filtering solutions to Mimecast was a simple process. Only requiring one phone call to set up the platform, Taylor notes, “It was one of the easiest technology transitions he’s ever had.” And after completing the Mimecast deployment, Taylor noticed a difference immediately when it came to his team’s email management practice.

The most significant benefit has been the time saved for Taylor and his staff around e-discovery. With Mimecast, whenever a discovery request comes in, Taylor can run the initial search and then hand off the task to the end user, who can manage searching, exporting records and formatting by his or herself. Taylor estimates Mimecast has freed up at least 50-75 percent of he and his staff’s time on e-discovery, allowing them to tackle other important projects. Not only that, by empowering Center Grove’s legal counsel, for example, with the ability to access the email records, it has helped reduce their time spent on discovery requests and, in turn, the expense to the public school system.

Mimecast has also provided Center Grove with comprehensive protection from spam and malware, by allowing end users themselves to help stop email-borne threats in the making. Center Grove staff now receive a single, daily email of graylisted items that they can control through a mobile app, which they can check anytime, even off-premise.

Center Grove staff have come to appreciate the accessibility to their email and data and the security Mimecast provides, but none more than Taylor himself, who can now be confident the school system’s email communications are running smoothly, even without his around-the-clock direct involvement.