Rugby Football Union Tackles ‘Shadow IT’ With Mimecast

The Rugby Football Union (RFU) is tackling shadow IT concerns with enterprise cloud services provider Mimecast Services Ltd.

The sporting organisation, which is responsible for rugby in 2,000 clubs and over 3,500 schools and universities in the UK, has signed up Mimecast Large File Send to securely share video footage of games without the need to use unsecured, consumer file-sharing services.

The RFU has also contracted Mimecast and its partner Koncise Solutions Ltd to consolidate all email requirements into one external cloud service. RFU employees are using Mimecast Unified Email Management to protect against inbound and outbound email-borne threats, deliberate or accidental data leaks and email service outages.

Mike Morris, RFU IT operations manager and project lead during the implementation, commented: “The RFU’s work relies heavily on managing digital media and video footage within the organisation, some of which are of a sensitive nature. Mimecast’s Large File Send lets us select users in the organisation to bypass internal mail size limits in order to securely send and receive large files.“

Morris added that apart from Large File Send, the most important Mimecast services they required were email continuity and data leak prevention.

He said: “We’d never had the kind of security and ease of use that Mimecast provides and it has been a huge benefit to us. Now we have the confidence that, if for any reason our email goes down, we have another tried and tested route to get emails in and out of the organisation. After years of wrestling with multiple, convoluted systems that were difficult to integrate, costly to maintain, and difficult to manage, Mimecast has made everything simple. The impact on our organisation has been immense.“

Alan Kenny, GM EMEA and APAC, Mimecast, added: “Email is critical for all organisations but limits on the size of attachments often lead employees to use consumer cloud file sharing services outside of the secure enterprise environment. The RFU uses email to communicate with so many staff, stakeholders and the general public, and Mimecast technology is able to remove the dangers created by shadow IT.“