SIS Customer Story

From Mimecast to Cryoserver: a recent convert’s experience

SIS (Sports Information Services) is the leading supplier of 24/7 betting services to retail and online operators globally. They provide high quality live and virtual content, ranging from broadcasts of horse racing and greyhounds to feeds of other sports data.

SIS’s email archiving issues

Before 2020, the company used Mimecast for its email archiving. Then SIS decided to move to Microsoft 365 (“Office 365”) for their email platform. It was then they encountered several obstacles. SIS’s IT Manager Jean Pierre Erasmus tells us that exporting his company’s data from Mimecast was a long, expensive process. He found Mimecast unhelpful when they knew SIS was leaving.

“It took us two to three months to get our data from them,” he says. And the cost was “steep”.

Two challenges for Cryoserver
 

SIS had almost 10 years’ worth of old emails to export, and trying to move them into Microsoft 365 proved to be a nightmare. The consultants tasked to do this attempted to create an extra archive for the old email within Microsoft 365. This separate repository would be SIS’s “static” archive, kept for compliance and court cases requiring e-discovery.

At the same time, SIS had another challenge. A division of the company had become a separate entity and was taken over by another company, NEP Group. And guess what. Yes, NEP wanted to take all email data relevant to the business it had acquired. So SIS had to find a way to split the collection of legacy data into two, in order to keep their data and give the rest to NEP.

After four months, SIS’s consultants had failed to create a static archive in Microsoft 365. Hearing about Jean Pierre’s woes, an associate recommended he speak to Cryoserver, which he did.

“Cryoserver gave us confidence in their excellent presentation,” says Jean Pierre. He liked the transparency and the audit trails, which our solution provides. “You can always see what everyone is doing.”

Cryoserver succeeded where others couldn’t

We invited him to a board session and showed him what we were going to do. Two weeks later it was done. We separated the 10 years’ of email, and migrated NEP’s share to Jean Pierre via FTP.  SIS now have their static archive in Cryoserver which users can access via Outlook, and NEP have the emails that rightfully belong to them.

Cryoserver charges SIS an annual fee for the management of their old data, and they have a user interface that allows them to do e-discovery and find the information they need in seconds.

Moving to Cryoserver? “Very easy”

We asked Jean Pierre how he found the move from Mimecast to us.

“Very straightforward,” he said. “From an admin point of view it’s been very easy – self-explanatory.”

“Cryoserver support has been really good. A simple process. No tricks, no hidden agendas,” he added, regarding the fact we haven’t surprised him with new charges he wasn’t aware of. “Financially, [using] Cryoserver is viable.”

Quicker searches
 

As for our solution, he says: “Discovery for emails is a lot faster than with Mimecast. Cryoserver is easier than Mimecast.  Exports are a lot faster. With Mimecast you had to wait quite a while, not only for an export but also for a look-up.” Also, Jean Pierre appreciates that Cryoserver keeps folder structures: “Mimecast doesn’t keep folder structure. If users have stuff in folders – receipts, etc., [Mimecast] would just collapse it.” It’s now easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

On-premises vs cloud
 

Jean Pierre says: “It’s time consuming to do everything yourself – you can buy a server and an on-prem  mail archive but it’s more efficient to do it this way [in the cloud with Cryoserver].”

If you’re thinking of changing email archiving providers, he has this advice:

“It’s really important for business to have it done quickly, nicely and seamlessly (particularly coming out of lockdown when all businesses are running at full tilt). You can then focus on getting other projects done.”Want to know more about Cryoserver’s advantages? See our side-by-side Cryoserver vs Mimecast comparison.