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Mimecast ensures good night’s sleep for Sonesta IT team

“Mimecast’s integration with Exchange is the best I’ve seen, providing our users with a familiar interface in the event of a Sonesta service outage yet enabling them to seamlessly roll back to our servers after the outage is over with all the history saved.” Carol Campbell Beggs Vice President, Technology Sonesta Collection
Sector:
Hospitality, Travel & Leisure
Size:
150+End Users
Location:
North America

About Sonesta

Sonesta Collection is a distinctive international collection of upscale hotels, resorts and cruise ships, with properties in Boston, New Orleans, Miami, St. Maarten and Brazil among others. Email outages can have a
big impact on Sonesta’s ability to provide the level of service its guests expect.

Challenge

Carol Campbell Beggs, Vice President, Technology for Sonesta, explains
that for years the company relied on an email redundancy tool that
worked reasonably well in terms of providing basic email capabilities if
Sonesta’s servers went down. But it lacked some features that Sonesta
wanted to have, such as the ability to handle internal as well as external
email and a retention period longer than 30 days. Additionally, the tool’s
spam filters had lost effectiveness over time, frustrating Sonesta’s
employees who were increasingly bombarded with spam.

There were also regulatory issues to consider – subject to both HIPAA
and PCI, Sonesta hoped to automate compliance through email management, and Data-Loss Prevention (DLP) wasn’t even on its current vendor’s roadmap. When the vendor was acquired and Sonesta’s relationships with its usual contacts faltered, Beggs decided the time was right to make a change.

“We’d really just outgrown our old vendor,” explains Beggs. “It was time
for us to put something more sophisticated in place.”

Solution

Beggs’ team put together a list of “must-haves” including:

  • The ability to not only provide email services during an email outage, but also to preserve all transmissions during that time and add them to Sonesta’s Exchange email archive.
  • DLP – the ability to look at the content of an email including
    attachments to ensure they comply both with Sonesta use policies and regulations such as HIPAA and PCI.
  • The ability to handle aliasing, which Sonesta uses extensively to route email accurately to its various properties.

Sonesta evaluated several vendors, some offering traditional appliance
models and some that were cloud-based services, and ultimately selected
Mimecast’s unified email management solution.