Affinity Credit Union is the eighth largest credit union in Canada with 56 locations and 750 employees.
Solution
- Mimecast Secure Email Gateway Targeted Threat Protection
- E-mail continuity
Take advantage
- Affinity will soon migrate to Office 365 – without having to worry about email security or continuity during or after the transition, thanks to Mimecast. The company will soon begin sending secure emails with Mimecast, and is evaluating Mimecast's archiving and related services to meet its email retention needs.
Challenge
When the number of phishing attacks on Affinity Credit Union increased, EVP and CIO Michael Elchuk knew he had to make a change.
The company's two on-premises email security applications were not up to the task of fending off increasingly sophisticated phishing techniques.
His IT team spent hours a week on manual workarounds and interventions, blocking more than necessary, resulting in false positives – and thus more support tickets and more manual labor.
"We did a lot of unique hacks," he recalls. "And that should not be the case."
Solution
Elchuk consulted with Gartner and they recommended Mimecast, a cloud-based service for email management and security.
The Mimecast service would enable Affinity to scan and sandbox attachments, provide quarantine areas for users, automatically encrypt emails and train employees on security.
Since the Mimecast Continuity Service is fully cloud-based, it would also facilitate the planned migration from Affinity to Office 365.
"Mimecast is very focused on email and doing one thing really well, rather than doing a lot of things not so well. The feature set is huge – Mimecast has everything we need to keep our email secure."
Michael Elchuk – EVP and CIO, Affinity Credit Union
Summary
Since Affinity implemented Mimecast, Elchuk reports that spam volume is down 75 percent and his team spends many fewer hours per week managing email than ever before.
Affinity has found that mimecast sandboxing with TTP Attachment Protect is very accurate – much more accurate than the IT team's manual checks – and now lets the mimecast service decide whether an attachment is malicious or not.
As a result, the company is seeing far fewer attacks and far fewer support tickets related to emails. Users are very happy, and even Affinity's CEO has mentioned how much he likes the daily spam digest he and all users receive.