Mimecast Earns Top Grades for Email Security from the University of Chichester
Solution
Choosing a suite of Mimecast email protection tools, the university was able to fortify its network from attacks and ensure outgoing mail was safer and less likely to end up in spam folders. The ease of implementation and user-friendly interface have made the work of IT less onerous while increasing security.
Problem
The U.K.’s University of Chichester needed to establish stronger cybersecurity defenses that could keep up with evolving threats and scale as its student body and staff grew – but without adding to its administrative workload. IT administrators also felt a duty to prepare students for the cyberthreats they could face in their future careers.
Institutions of higher education – and the public sector overall – have been a prime target for fraudsters, especially when learning went remote during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fortunately, the University of Chichester had managed to remain relatively safe from harm. Just a couple of relatively minor cyberattacks over a two-year period had succeeded in affecting a small number of users at the 183-year-old U.K. institution, though the university had not experienced any major breaches or ransomware attacks.
Still, the IT staff didn’t want to rely on luck to secure the university’s 5,500 full-time students and 1,000-member staff, located across two campuses. Even those small incidents required the university’s full-time IT staff – IT Service Development Manager Haydn Tarr and Senior Technical Specialist Andrew Thompson – to spend roughly 30 hours on mitigation and remediation, which was time that could have been put to better use, Tarr said.