Boston Celtics Clamp Down on Spam

Network World — On the basketball court, the Boston Celtics are a well-oiled machine, dispatching lesser opponents with ease and style. But behind the scenes, the Celtics' franchise recently found that its e-mail infrastructure was outdated and badly in need of an overhaul.

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Celtics' vice president of technology Jay Wessel said over the years he had built up layers of filters and spam tools, to sit on top of Microsoft Exchange, some that were homegrown and others purchased from vendors. Wessel wanted to get rid of this patchwork of tools and find a single vendor to manage his e-mail security and archiving.

"It just started to become unmanageable," Wessel says. "There were too many places, too many points of failure where mail could be stuck in queues. It was time to overhaul that infrastructure."

Wessel decided to go with a software-as-a-service program and considered Google's Postini and Mimecast, ultimately choosing Mimecast. The two vendors seemed to offer similar technology, but Wessel liked that Mimecast was a "small young nimble company," joking that he preferred not to deal with "big bad Google." 

Mimecast's e-mail management service handles all spam filtering and archiving off-site. The company has data centers on multiple continents "so a catastrophe in one data center isn't going to kill my e-mail," Wessel says.

The Celtics, who have about 100 end users, switched over to Mimecast at the beginning of 2009. The cost ended up being less than the price of Wessel's subscription updates for his other e-mail filtering tools, and saved him a lot of time on maintenance. That's important given that Wessel is one of only two IT pros with the team.

"I used to have to look at mail queues constantly," he says. "Now in the Mimecast world I don't touch it."

Wessel knows it's working because "I have a very loud user community. If they're getting too much mail, they're going to let me know. And if there's mail they're not getting that they should be getting, they're going to let me know."

Before moving to Mimecast, the Celtics suffered various e-mail outages, but no major virus attacks in the last five years.

"I started building spam filters over 10 years ago," Wessel says. "I was doing a really good job of keeping viruses and spam out. I was nervous about moving but I also knew it was time. It outgrew me and I really needed to move on."

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