Mortgage lender gets streamlined security and compliance — and huge cost savings

LeaderOne Financial — a US mortgage lender operating in multiple states — was already using Barracuda to secure its Microsoft 365 deployment in 2019 when VP of Information Technology Services Wyatt Hansen joined the company. 

And over the years since then, like many of our customers, Wyatt has been happily impressed by the evolution of Barracuda Email Protection. As he tells it, the many new features and capabilities added to the solution have delivered immense benefits in terms of better security, easier regulatory compliance and huge cost savings. 

To get the whole story, check out the complete case study. 

Benefits add up to big savings

Many of Wyatt’s favorite features of Barracuda Email Protection result in cost savings for his department and for the company as a whole. His estimate of the total amount saved is pretty impressive:

“Barracuda Email Protection saves us a huge amount of IT staff time in many different ways. Finding and remediating instances of inappropriate — as well as malicious — email. Conducting archive searches to support audits and e-discovery. Enforcing clean-desk policies. Ensuring DMARC configuration stays current… I’d be very surprised if the savings amount to less than $100,000 per year, and I think it could be as high as $250,000.”— Wyatt Hansen, VP of Information Technology Services, LeaderOne Financial

Archiving that streamlines audits and e-discovery

As a regulated financial services company, LeaderOne is required, among other things, to retain at least seven years of records, including all interactions with borrowers, partners, employees, and so on. Wyatt says that this was long a source of anxiety. Their many distributed offices used a variety of archiving solutions, and they were never confident of being in compliance. 

Once they implemented the cloud archiving capability of Barracuda Email Protection, they gained that confidence, along with a much faster and easier process for retrieving files when responding to audits or e-discovery.

“Cloud Archiving … has no trouble absorbing the absurd amount of email and other data that we need to store. And when it comes to working with our legal team and auditors to pull the exact data we need, everything is so much easier. The interface is clean and simple, and search functions are very robust and granular.” — Wyatt Hansen, VP of Information Technology Services, LeaderOne Financial

Automated compliance

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) requires organizations to ensure that no sensitive or protected information, such as the ample financial information routinely included in mortgage application documents, is transmitted to unauthorized recipients or in unprotected form. 

Wyatt pointed out that Barracuda Email Protection delivers invaluable help with GLBA compliance.

“One feature of Barracuda Email Protection that is insanely helpful in preventing GLBA violations is how it scans email for sensitive financial or other information and encrypts it automatically.”— Wyatt Hansen, VP of Information Technology Services, LeaderOne Financial

And Wyatt also reports that his team has benefited from an unadvertised (until now) use case for Incident Response, which is designed to automate and accelerate the process of finding and deleting malicious emails from recipients’ inboxes. Sometimes users will misidentify intended recipients of internal emails containing sensitive information.

“They call us and say oh jeez I meant to send this email with compensation info to Michael T. in HR instead of Michael H. in Marketing, for example. And with Incident Response, it’s super easy to go pull that back out of the wrong person’s inbox, and even to tell the sender whether it got opened before we got to it.—Wyatt Hansen, VP of Information Technology Services, LeaderOne Financial

Get the whole story

Wyatt has plenty more to say about Barracuda Email Protection benefits, such as protecting LeaderOne’s reputation and ability to deliver marketing emails with Domain Fraud Protection, and helping to enforce their clean-desk initiative with Data Inspector.

To get the full story, download the case study right now.