- Sector:
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IT
- Size:
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20,000+ End Users
- Location:
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Middle East & Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, Australia and the Americas
Context
Founded in 1983, Dimension Data is an ICT services and solutions provider that uses its technology, global service delivery capability, and entrepreneurial spirit to accelerate the business ambitions of its clients. Dimension Data is a member of the NTT Group.
Dimension Data today operates in 51 countries in five regions – Middle East & Africa, Europe, Asia Pacific, Australia and the Americas. The Group’s focus has evolved to adapting the design, management and development of business technology to drive innovation, enable market leadership and help companies operate tighter, better, more cost- effectively and competitively.
Challenge
Dimension Data’s brand refresh was the perfect opportunity to realign and consolidate all email addresses across the group. The implementation of the refresh and the email address update needed to be well coordinated and perfectly executed to ensure minimal negative impact on the business.
While the marketing team managed the creative elements, the technically demanding job of rolling out the updated brand across the global email environment fell to Laurent Leclercq, head of group IT operations.
“The objectives sounded simple enough. We had to bring 12,500 employees in six regions sitting on approximately 57 domains into one dimensiondata.com domain for email. In addition, we had to consolidate five disparate email security solutions all over the world into one single system without upsetting the email communications of any employees,” says Leclercq. “As you can imagine, the goals are easy to write down, but technically challenging to implement.”
Solution
Before Dimension Data started to choose vendors, the company first had to select a technology strategy. There was only one option: take it to the cloud.
Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) was the only solution, as it could quickly consolidate the users onto a single domain. “SaaS would alleviate internal pressure in terms of costs, skills, scalability and time to roll out while removing many of the integration risks,” says Leclercq. “However, this would only happen if we worked with the right partner.”
After a rigorous due diligence process, Mimecast was selected on the merits of its comprehensive policy control and intelligent Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) capabilities. “Mimecast was the only provider that could tackle the critical address rewriting issue and ensure flawless email delivery across the globe,” says Leclercq.
Mimecast’s Intelligent MTA gave Dimension Data a centralised solution with one consistent security and email delivery approach. The single solution meant less complexity, centralised control and immediate global implementation of security policies.
“All the regions we operate in had separate email hygiene products, but now we have one email management expert handling the messaging security for the entire organisation,” says Leclercq.
“What also impressed us, almost as much as the technology, was the project-orientated approach Mimecast applied to the implementation. The project team had to work in close collaboration with all the regions to prepare for the move onto a single global domain with Mimecast acting as a critical element in keeping email operational.”
“Thanks to the intensive planning and support from Mimecast, our users didn’t experience a moment’s downtime. We have come to think of Mimecast as SaaS with a face,” says Leclercq.
Benefits
“From a high level perspective, the benefits of migrating to Mimecast Email Security are that it has given us a centralised view of the email security environment while reducing complexity, reducing costs to deliver, and giving Dimension Data the ability to quickly and easily scale globally,” says Leclercq.
“Migrating 12,500 email addresses, all with significant regional differences, over to the unified .com domain had the potential to be traumatic. Thanks to Mimecast, we were able to quickly and simply create a single consolidated namespace across multiple systems and directory structures,” confirms Leclercq.
The IT team was able to centrally manage the customised address rewriting function so that both the new.com addresses and the old addresses could run simultaneously.
“The ability to manage the migration in phases was critical. Many of our legacy back office IT systems depend on the old addresses, so a paced transition was needed so as not to disrupt the global IT architecture. An instantaneous switch-over of all users to the new infrastructure would have been disastrous. Mimecast’s MTA “made” a staged transition possible,” says Leclercq.
