Tender Summary: Email Management, Archiving and Continuity

Objectives

• Safeguard municipal email communications against advanced cyber threats, including phishing, malware, and ransomware.
• Ensure uninterrupted business continuity and operational resilience for critical municipal functions.
• Maintain strict data confidentiality, integrity, and availability while meeting statutory compliance requirements.
• Optimize email system performance through centralized, tamper-proof archiving and proactive threat management.

Scope of Work

The project entails the renewal and upgrade of enterprise email security and archiving services for approximately 300 municipal users. Key deliverables include:

• Deployment of an enhanced email security platform integrated with existing Microsoft Exchange Online environments.
• Implementation of full email archiving capturing all messages, attachments, and metadata in a centralized repository.
• Management of standardized corporate email signatures across all departments.
• Establishment of robust continuity and disaster recovery protocols ensuring instant failover and data retrieval during primary server outages.
• Ongoing threat monitoring, automated sanitization of malicious content, and generation of detailed security and compliance reports.
• User training, system maintenance, and support for a 36-month contract period, subject to early termination for underperformance.

Technical Requirements

• Must utilize a certified enterprise-grade email security and archiving solution compatible with Microsoft ecosystems.
• System must provide a read-only, tamper-proof archive supporting long-term retention, granular policy enforcement, and rapid eDiscovery.
• Requires real-time mail queue monitoring, advanced threat intelligence integration, and automated filtering of malicious payloads.
• Must accelerate primary email performance by offloading archival and security processing to the cloud.
• Deliverables include seamless configuration, comprehensive documentation, and continuous software updates to counter emerging vulnerabilities.

Skills and Experience Requirements

• Valid certification as an authorized Microsoft Partner and Mimecast Business Partner/Reseller.
• Submission of four signed appointment and reference letters for similar completed projects (or three letters for reduced scoring).
• Key personnel must provide CVs demonstrating a minimum of two years’ direct experience in deploying and managing enterprise email security and archiving solutions.
• Bidders must achieve a minimum functionality score of 80 out of 100 points during technical evaluation.
• Demonstrated capability to manage complex municipal IT infrastructure within public sector procurement frameworks.

Explanation of Key Terms

• Mimecast: A cloud-based platform specializing in email security, archiving, and business continuity, designed to protect organizations from sophisticated cyber threats and ensure data accessibility.
• eDiscovery: The legal and compliance process of identifying, preserving, collecting, and searching electronically stored information for audit or litigation purposes.
• Performance Security: A financial guarantee (such as a bank guarantee or cash deposit) required from the successful bidder to compensate the municipality for financial losses resulting from contract breach, delays, or sub-standard service delivery.
• PPPFA 80/20 Preference System: A South African procurement framework allocating 80% of evaluation points to competitive pricing and 20% to socio-economic transformation goals, including ownership by historically disadvantaged individuals, youth, women, persons with disabilities, and rural enterprises.