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Accent Peerless - Email Management

Accent Peerless was becoming overwhelmed by spam and junk mail, consuming network bandwidth, frustrating users and distracting the IT team from business-critical work. Mimecast provided a cost-effective solution to all email security, storage and continuity needs, saving money and improving efficiency.

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The Organisation

Leading Housing Association Accent Peerless Ltd manages over 3700 properties, providing high quality, affordable rented housing and supported housing across Surrey and the South East.  Their vision is “to support the creation of vibrant and sustainable communities by being a catalyst that enables people to improve the quality of their lives.”  

As a provider of social housing, it is hugely important for Accent Peerless to keep costs down, whilst maintaining the high level of business efficiency that enables outstanding service delivery.

The Business Need

The success of the company’s vision relies in part on their ability to be as efficient as possible in every area of their operations.  Ineffective email management can have a disproportionately negative impact on efficiency, affecting all users across an organisation.  In 2008 Accent Peerless’ email solution was, according to IT manager Vanessa Baker, “no longer fit for purpose”.  The organisation was receiving hundreds of spam emails each day, consuming network bandwidth and frustrating staff who had to invest time manually filtering out junk from their legitimate business email.  Overwhelmed with Helpdesk calls about spam, the IT team soon realised that an alternative solution was essential.

Accent Peerless also needed an email retention solution to ensure they were FSA compliant, as well as a simple retrieval method to find “lost” email and manage the email audit trail. 

Why Montal?

Accent Peerless wanted to find an easy-to-manage solution without the time and expense usually associated with purchasing, maintaining and housing additional hardware.  Having worked with Montal for over 10 years for their other IT requirements, Vanessa turned to them for advice on this new issue.

In-depth industry expertise and a strong, long-standing partnership with Mimecast put Montal in the ideal position to deliver a fully comprehensive solution for Accent Peerless’ email management needs, whilst keeping costs, training requirements and disruption to staff at an absolute minimum.  Vanessa’s previous experience with Montal’s technical consultants gave her complete confidence that they would be able to thoroughly assess Accent Peerless’ needs, assemble the optimum service package and guarantee seamless implementation.

The Solution

Mimecast’s Unified Email Management service connects to your in-house business email systems through the internet, giving you powerful, enterprise level service without the need for investment for the additional hardware, software or management time that in-house solutions would demand. 

The service integrates with all major email applications to allow unified security, continuity and archiving - freeing up valuable resources you can devote to growing your business. 

After reviewing several other solutions, Vanessa could see that Mimecast offered a truly comprehensive service, providing additional functionality that she hadn’t thought achievable within her budget.

With clear business benefits, including detailed reporting capabilities and an easy email branding tool, the organisation could gain an insight into their usage levels and were able to take control of and standardise their electronic corporate branding.  Mimecast also offers email archiving for up to 10 years, instantly removing any concerns Accent Peerless had over email retrieval regulations and saving a huge amount of time.

Furthermore, being a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, unpredictable future storage costs could be eliminated, making Vanessa’s email budget far easier to manage going forward. 

Montal's Approach

Montal maintained constant communication with Vanessa during Mimecast’s implementation, orchestrating an exchange server synchronisation that enabled all user details to be collected before Accent Peerless went live with the service.  The solution was set up over the Christmas break, so staff could start 2009 with their new, improved email management system.

An Unbeatable Result

The IT department have been extremely impressed at the speed with which they can now retrieve emails.  Where they need to locate specific correspondences for legal reasons, these have been available in minutes rather than hours.

The biggest impact Mimecast has made, however, has been on general business efficiency.  Spam messaging has been virtually eliminated, greatly reducing the number of IT helpdesk calls and freeing up the IT team to focus on key business projects and issues, and relieving the organisation's users from the daily frustration of sorting through junk mail.

Vanessa told us,

“Mimecast provides value for money and is so easy to manage that out IT team have more time to concentrate on other business projects.  The 10 year retention option means we never have to worry about finding an email again, and as we have a “bottomless inbox” the service has definitely saved money and improved efficiency.  Mimecast provides everything under one roof – we are very pleased with the solution and would recommend it to anyone facing the same issues”.

- Vanessa Baker, IT Manager, Accent Peerless