Mimecast
Why Strongpoint is a 'tremendous tool' for this publicly traded cyber resilience company running Salesforce and NetSuite
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"We’re able to rely on Strongpoint to say, ‘Hey, look, this changed on such-and-such a date.’ It really is that final arbiter for us..”
— Matthew McVey, Salesforce Tech Analyst Team Lead at Mimecast
We recently sat down with Matthew McVey, the company’s Salesforce Tech Analyst Team Lead, to talk about how he uses Strongpoint to bring additional transparency to the company's Salesforce systems.
Here's what we learned.
Cross-Platform Compliance Concerns
Mimecast uses Salesforce as their CRM and NetSuite as their ERP, and runs Strongpoint in both. Like a lot of companies working with Salesforce, the platform’s audit requirements have been changing — while no PII is stored in Mimecast’s Org, auditors were concerned about their CPQ system and the Advanced Approvals package, which integrates with NetSuite and could have a downstream impact on their financials.
Without a system for monitoring it, compliance prep was growing more complicated every year. “I lost seven weeks of my life to end-of-year auditing!” McVey told us.
That all changed when Mimecast’s Salesforce team got onboard with Strongpoint. Finding us was easy — all McVey had to do was look at the company’s ERP systems.
“I remember seeing it initially in NetSuite and I was super excited. There are things that Salesforce doesn’t tell us that I can get out of Strongpoint.”
“I lost seven weeks of my life to end-of-year auditing!”
Complex Systems, Simple Solutions
Mimecast runs a complex CRM with a lot of development activity occurring across multiple environments. Much of the work of managing this activity is handled by Gearset and Jira. And with Strongpoint's tools in the mix, they had an extra layer of efficiency.
Strongpoint was able to give them the big-picture visibility into what was happening in their Org — logging all changes to custom Objects and revenue-related CPQ data, and flagging anything that might be an issue on audit.
“Ultimately, we’re able to rely on Strongpoint to say, ‘Hey, look, this changed on such-and-such a date.’ It really is that final arbiter for us.”
Audit Readiness
Mimecast is currently in the process of building out policies that will further refine their ability to track changes of concern. But just using Strongpoint’s out-of-the-box tools, McVey and his team are in a much better position; “nothing’s getting missed, which is huge.”
McVey also had praise for Strongpoint’s ‘closed-loop’ system; changes to policies that govern approvals are tracked, logged, and are themselves subject to approval. This makes it difficult to retroactively alter something that could affect compliance or security.
“If I don’t have the right approval, I can’t make this change,” McVey explained. “I go through and try to update a policy, and I have to create a change request… Strongpoint already proves itself out in that regard.”
Discovery and Troubleshooting
With Strongpoint running in their Org, audits are going to be a lot simpler for Mimecast. But it's also had an effect on day-to-day admin work, which is equally important for McVey and his team.
“We had an external vendor make a change to a process builder, and one of our developers made a change to the same process builder… when our developer pushed their changes through, it broke a bunch of stuff, because the vendor’s piece wasn’t done yet.”
In an Org like Mimecast’s, where development activity is common, this can be an annoying — and frequent — situation. Fortunately, thanks to Strongpoint, they’ll be moving forward with greater visibility and can avoid these situations in the future.
McVey also had praise for Strongpoint’s dependency relationship diagram (DRD) — an interactive, graphical representation of the connections between customizations.
“It’s such a tremendous tool to see how things are connected.”
Working With Strongpoint
Mimecast is just getting started with Strongpoint for Salesforce — but if the company’s experience in NetSuite is any indication, it’s going to be a long, productive relationship.
“Rick (Roesler, Strongpoint’s Senior Salesforce Developer) has been wildly instrumental in getting me to a place where, not only am I going to be better able to manage Strongpoint, but it’ll serve a better purpose.”
Ultimately, that’s our goal when working with all our customers — every one has unique needs, and with powerful tools like Strongpoint, building a system that serves those needs is a big part of the onboarding process.
Watch the Full Conversation
Register to watch our full conversation with McVey — and learn more about how Mimecast is leveraging Strongpoint for faster, smarter, stress-free audits.
