The company specializing in premium cigars knows that carefully crafting its product also means staying up-to-date on IT technology. That’s why, just over six months ago, it revamped its email security to address one of the main cybersecurity risks facing businesses.
The slogan that accompanies Tabacalera is composed of two terms, tradition and innovation, and they faithfully reflect the spirit of this company that has been in business for almost 400 years. Since 1636, Tabacalera has been linked to the history of cigars. The company is the natural heir to the ancient tobacco trade between the Spanish Empire and the Americas and its flourishing industry. In 1758, the Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville was inaugurated, the largest in Europe at the time and the second largest building in Spain at the time. In 1887, it was incorporated as the Tobacco Lease Company to manage the tobacco monopoly in Spain. It operated under this structure until 1945, when Tabacalera Sociedad Anónima, known worldwide as Tabacalera, was created. At the turn of the millennium in 2000, the company merged with the French tobacco company Seita, creating Altadis, which was acquired by the Imperial Tobacco Group in 2008. In 2013, the company’s premium cigar division reclaimed its historic Tabacalera name and, seven years later, was purchased by a major group of international investors. Currently, Tabacalera SLU is comprised of a team of 120 people in Spain, and the group has approximately 4,000 employees worldwide.
And if nearly four centuries of tradition underpin its tradition, its desire to stay ahead of the curve also makes it stand out in innovation, not only in its factories and premium cigars, but also in IT technology. The best example of this is the improvements made to its email infrastructure. Antón de la Rambelje, Director of Information Systems at Tabacalera SLU , explains that they were “looking for a solution to add layers of protection to our email system (specifically an M365 E3 and E5 Advances security package) and we began to explore possible cloud-based solutions. After meeting with Mimecast, we decided to continue with this provider.” Previously, the company’s email protection solution was M365 E5 Advanced Security.
When Tabacalera SLU contacted Mimecast in the summer of 2024 to request a proposal for 400 users, all of them under its domain, to fully cover their corporate email, Mimecast closed the distribution agreement with Ingecom Ignition in parallel, so that the wholesaler was in charge of supporting the project through the selection of a leading IT partner, specifically Asseco Spain.
Asseco Spain, recently selected by Mimecast as a strategic partner for its business in Spain, works to offer the market AI-based cybersecurity solutions, positioning itself as a leader in Artificial Intelligence and digital transformation solutions.
A three-month project
By the time summer arrived, the technical team at Tabacalera SLU had already done its homework and had also studied the solutions of two Mimecast competitors, ultimately opting for the latter provider.
In various meetings, they defined what would be most convenient for the company to improve its email system, so that “by early June, we were able to define a specific offer thanks to the Mimecast Product Bundle Email Security Cloud Integrated (CI) solution to cover all users, regardless of how many computers or mobile devices there were ,” recalls De la Rambelje, adding that “it took three months of deployment, including blocking policies.”
Strong spam blocking
Asked about the level of satisfaction with the solution, the Director of Information Systems at Tabacalera SLU stated that the experience “is very satisfactory. Last week, for example, out of 13,000 emails, we detected ten malware attacks, nine blocked, and one released. This same week, Mimecast blocked 42 spam emails and released nine. Initially, we had a few ‘false positives,’ and it took us longer to make progress,” but they’re now past that stage, and everything is working as expected.
Photo: Antón de la Rambelje, Director of Information Systems at Tabacalera SLU.
