Accounting & Business Services - Mimecast to Proofpoint Migration

A leading UK accounting firm was using Mimecast for security and email archiving.  Whilst the incumbent solution was functioning, the client was assessing the market with the following goals:

•             Enhance overall cybersecurity posture
•             Leverage more advanced threat detection and compliance features
•             Achieve greater operational efficiency

Considerations for the target email archiving platform

Analyst and researcher, Forrester compared Mimecast with Proofpoint and their report stated, "Mimecast lacks many capabilities and a solid roadmap to close these gaps. Modern organisations need a complete security platform built to protect people and defend data from today’s advanced threats”.    

The client needed to consolidate IT security controls in critical areas such as impersonation protection, account takeover protection, security awareness training, email archiving and compliance. To ensure regulatory policies could be easily enforced to reduce the risk of costly fines, straightforward procedures for discovery, regulatory compliance and data access were essential. A central, searchable repository needed to support a wide range of securely stored content types. Data needed to be quickly collected, searched and retrieved on demand, essential for early case insight.  

Solution Benefits 

For compliance, the email can now be processed and stored based on retention policies, with full chain of custody essential in litigation proceedings. Data is under management until it is disposed of, according to retention settings.  

Increased operational efficiencies have been achieved as scalable protection makes security teams more efficient through the automation and unification of disparate analyst and administrator workflows. Machine learning is applied from the point of collecting data to performing eDiscovery. False positives in compliance reviews are reduced, saving considerable time and costs.

Bulk extraction of data from Mimecast is not a standard, built-in feature.  For a fee, Mimecast offers to perform a mass data extraction, but this can be prohibitively expensive and is rarely possible at short notice. 

Once extracted, the data often can’t be natively ingested into a new target platform without an element of post extraction data processing. 

Our client required a service that did not rely on access to any internal resources, either personnel or infrastructure.

The use of the TrueSwift Migration Factory™ (TMF) solution was contracted to address all the firm's needs.

In addition to professional services and specialist migration tools, the TMF solution included the required infrastructure to deliver the project, including network servers and storage to extract, process and securely transfer the data to Proofpoint for ingestion.

As all the infrastructure requirements were provided by TrueSwift, the lead time for engagement was just 24 hours and extractions from Mimecast were started within 48 hours.

The fully hosted, fully managed solution facilitated the swift and efficient extraction of data from Mimecast before presenting to Proofpoint for ingestion.

TrueSwift's close working relationship with the Proofpoint technical team ensured a seamless migration.

Once initiated, the extraction was scheduled to run 24/7.  Network bandwidth and data storage was configured to optimise this phase of the project.

Once extracted, the TrueSwift ArchiveX tool processed the data and stored it in a format optimised for fast ingestion into the Proofpoint environment.

The migration was also managed 24/7 to ensure the quickest throughput and reduced project timeframe.  Throughout the engagement, weekly calls were held to keep the customer up to date with progress and to discuss any issues (including migration failures).  Weekly reports were also generated, providing detailed insight into performance and other throughput metrics.