Because poor email security is no laughing matter
The Timaru District Council (TDC), home to some 49,000 people, and with nearly 1,000 email accounts to manage or preserve, were increasingly frustrated with the middling performance and lacklustre service from their existing secure email provider.
The last straw for TDC’s Chief Information Officer, Justin Bagust, was one of the provider’s technician’s amusement at the difficulty caused by their software. “Their tech laughed at my tech instead of solving the problem. We weren’t too happy about that!” Bagust exclaims.
Paying more, for more frustration and grief
The TDC’s user frustrations had been building up over time and were only compounded by spiralling costs and poorer commercial terms.
As Bagust says “We used to call the old solution ‘Portalpoint’, because it had a frustrating number of windows and portals you’d have to contend with to do the simplest tasks. That caused a lot of grief, tying even skilled technicians up in knots. It meant everything was taking longer, and no end to the frustration.
“We had a fairly good handle on phishing and ransomware and so on, but one big factor was a rapidly escalating cost with the previous solution. This was a big motivating factor – basically, that provider massively escalated its costs and also demanded we enter into lengthy contracts without forewarning.” He says.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Justin and his team began putting their feelers out for a replacement.
Doing a heap more, more easily, for a whole lot less
After quickly coming to grips with the challenge, SSS recommended AssureMail™ – a cloud-hosted managed security service that also secures users’ mailboxes post mail delivery through Office 365 and Gmail integration.
The SSS team designed an innovative AI-based, API integrated secure email gateway that prevents malicious emails reaching mailboxes and secures mailboxes once email is received.
With all TDC’s email filters running through Microsoft 365 first, Bagust was amazed at how much AssureMail™ intercepted, and with very few false positives.
“SSS said ‘we have something you might quite like’,” he says. “Turns out we did quite like it, and, after being impressed with the solution – which included comprehensive spam protection and heuristic threat analysis while easily searching large quantities of email – we were even more impressed with the price. I’ve run the numbers, and we’re getting a better service for around 40% less!
“I’d recommend AssureMail without a doubt. It’s easy to use, unobtrusive for day-to-day email, and delivers simplicity in handling user requests and searches. Reporting is solid too, with standard 30-day reports generated automatically.” he says.
Sorting your shift out
While the implementation by SSS went smoothly, migrating email archives from the previous provider was another story, with some rather unfortunate stonewalling and heel-dragging a feature.
“Basically, they didn’t cooperate and had us over a barrel. At one stage, the data transfer rate was throttled to such an extent that it would have taken a year for the email to come across.” says Bagust.
However, SSS’s vendor management came into play and – after a few candid calls – the roadblocks were removed and AssureMail™ established.
Says Bagust, “The SSS team went in to bat for us and did a great job of managing the project, communicating, and getting to a point where we could shift over. We’ve got a system that works, have amazing support with very knowledgeable techs, and – as a bonus – they don’t laugh at us.”
Though feedback like that does put a smile on the faces of the SSS team.
