Customer story: Morgan Hunt

Recruitment firm Morgan Hunt uses Egress Protect, Prevent, and Defend to reduce IT burden, boost email security.
Published on 18th Jul 2022
Recruitment firm Morgan Hunt uses Egress Protect, Prevent, and Defend to reduce IT burden, boost email security.
Morgan Hunt Header

Morgan Hunt is a multi-award-winning recruitment agency with over 150 consultants across London, Birmingham, Manchester, Bristol, and Glasgow. They provide specialist recruitment services to over 2,000 clients.

The challenge

Founded in 1994, Morgan Hunt is a recruitment business with a quality-assured reputation for placing talented people into UK public, private and nonprofit roles. From managed service to contingent recruitment methods, the company works with clients in various sectors, including education, health, social housing, technology, finance, property, social care, professional services, central and local government, and charities.

Like many businesses, Morgan Hunt found navigating the ever-changing landscape of email threats challenging — and the company’s previous email security solution was quickly becoming too expensive. “Our email security software was very modular,” explained Gezanfar Masud, Head of IT for Morgan Hunt. “It wasn’t a bad product, but we didn’t see the value from it. As additional attack vectors arose, we needed to add on protections, driving up our operating costs. It was a bit of overkill and definitely too expensive for what Morgan Hunt needed.”

Additionally, the company’s previous email security software did little to empower employees to make informed email decisions, instead putting the onus on the overburdened IT department. “Employees would submit help tickets to check if emails they received were safe to open or not, then the IT team would have to analyze the email to determine if it was a threat. In most cases, the emails weren’t malicious — the users were simply being diligent — but it took valuable time away from the IT team,” Gezanfar said.

With Egress Defend in place, we’ve seen an immediate return on our investment, and our team is now freed up to deal with other important tasks.

The solution

Morgan Hunt demoed Egress Prevent and Protect to see how it compared to the company’s previous email security solution. “I was pleasantly surprised with Egress,” said Gezanfar. “Many of its features were more user-friendly, especially the dashboard and reporting. And the cost saving was attractive as well. Additionally, unlike our previous secure email gateway that was resource-heavy and policy-intensive, Egress required far less configuration to be instantly useful.”

As part of the recruitment sector, Morgan Hunt constantly interacts with sensitive client and employee data, making data protection a huge priority. “We needed to ensure we weren’t leaving ourselves exposed to data exfiltration and preventing potentially disgruntled consultants or employees from forwarding private information to personal email addresses. Egress allows us to easily analyze reports, and if we see information leaving, our HR team follows up directly.”

The pop-up redirects and banners — users love those because it’s in their face, straightforward, and easy to understand.

The results

Just 18 months after deploying Egress Prevent and Protect, Morgan Hunt added Egress Defend to its email security arsenal — and its effect was immediately felt. “Our service desk used to be inundated with user tickets about email safety,” Gezanfar said. “But with Defend in place, I rarely see those kinds of tickets anymore. We’ve seen an immediate return on our investment, and our team is now freed up to deal with other important tasks. And Defend’s admin portal lets the IT team monitor and proactively remove malicious emails – neutralizing the threat before it hits the users’ inbox.”

According to Gezanfar, users across the organization have wholeheartedly embraced Egress. “The pop-up redirects and banners — users love those because it’s in their face, straightforward, and easy to understand,” he said.

Gezanfar credits Egress’ account and support teams with playing a crucial role in Morgan Hunt’s security. “Working with Egress has never been a relationship where I feel the company pushes things down my throat. It’s more of a consultative approach where we share what we’re working on, and Egress helps us determine if there’s a true business case for the decision we’re considering. They’re always monitoring our environments, providing insights for how we can optimize the solution and maximize our returns,” he concluded.

About Egress

Egress is the only cloud email security platform to continuously assess human risk and dynamically adapt policy controls, preparing customers to defend against advanced phishing attacks and outbound data breaches before they happen.

Trusted by the world’s biggest brands, Egress is private equity backed with offices in London, New York, and Boston.