Tribal Introduces Webroot Email Security
and Business Continuity Services

Tribal Group plc, is a leading provider of advisory, technology and service delivery solutions to the public sector in the UK and internationally. Its 2000 plus employees are predominantly located in the UK across 25 offices. Karl Mulvany, IT Services Delivery Director at Tribal, has a team of 34 staff in Corporate IT Services to support these users, of which 35 percent are desk-based and 65 percent have laptops. It has used email security on a software-as-a-service platform since 2007.

Business drivers

With its commitment to continuous improvement, the company both delivers, and expects, the best in every aspect of its business, so when Mulvany felt that the email security was not as good as it should be, he decided to review the market. "I felt that the current provider, who we'd used for two years, just wasn't doing enough, especially in controlling spam, and the service was falling short," Mulvany explains.

At the same time, budgets had tightened due to the economic slowdown and the IT department was tasked to deliver greater results with fewer resources. Mulvany summarises the drivers as, "we needed to have a more cost effective solution as in times of recession we were, and still are, particularly cost conscious. So this was an opportunity to both save money and improve service."

Finding a solution

In 2009, Mulvany was introduced to three email security vendors. "When it came to the presentations from the three contenders, Webroot was miles ahead with both its offering and the cost," says Mulvany. The decision proved to be an easy one and Tribal agreed a multi-year deal for the Webroot Email Security Service. "I was confident that having chosen the right supplier, who have a reputation for having a skilled email management team, we would be able to transition the service smoothly with minimum disruption to our customers," he adds.

And to reduce the company's risk further Mulvany signed up for Webroot's Business Continuity Service at the end of the year. Tribal had not considered such a service before, but saw the importance of being able to give all staff access to their own webmail account with 28 days of email history in the event of a network outage, and thus ensure business was not interrupted.

More for less

Very quickly Mulvany noticed an improvement in security and was impressed by the learning mode within the Webroot service: "The switchover was very smooth and immediately Webroot gave us better antivirus protection with its multiple filters, better email disclaimer management and better spam control." Tribal receives 16.5 million emails per month of which 1.5 million are legitimate. With the previous supplier only 90 percent of the 15 million spams had been filtered out and there was some negative feedback from users about it.

And not only is Mulvany delighted with the improved performance of the email security, but he is paying less for it: "I reckon we're saving 45 percent when comparing just the email security costs, and even with the Business Continuity Service factored in we're talking a 30 percent cost reduction, so that's a huge benefit to us."

Mulvany has also found other elements of the service invaluable, such as the automatic back up of mail which is held for 28 days — again important from a continuity perspective and something that the other contenders do not provide; the LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) integration which was easy and reticence-free; and the positive attitude of Webroot staff. "The support team is responsive and customer-focused; everyone has a 'can do', approach rather than talking about the difficulties, which I used to get a lot of before," comments Mulvany.

Looking ahead

For the future, driven by the company requirement for continuous improvement, Mulvany sees the need for email encryption as a natural follow-on from the laptop and memory stick encryption he has already implemented. And he also has plans to roll out Web filtering across the whole company by 2011 once the resources are available. "Webroot will be in the frame for both these of course," states Mulvany.