Pres Les

Company Intro

Pres Les is one of South Africa’s largest and most distinguished direct selling companies. Founded in 1971, the firm has always been a keen advocate of social and economic empowerment in a region where many don’t have the opportunities they deserve. Today, its luxury bedding, home accessories, and cookware are enjoyed in over one million homes across Southern Africa. As CIO and IT Director, Darren Levin’s mission over the past two-and-a-half years has been to digitally transform Pres Les, migrate key IT systems to the cloud, and refocus its efforts on cybersecurity. The company has over 300 full-time staff and a 14,000-strong consultant network.

The Problem

Digital transformation can bring huge customer experience and operational benefits to organizations. But it also exposes them to new cyber-risks. Pres Les experienced this first-hand as it moved from paper orders as the primary mechanism for customer interaction, to becoming a modern, digital-first business. The firm rolled out new service delivery tools, a website, cloud infrastructure, and other digital innovations. Despite only launching in August 2020, its app now fields over 70% of all customer orders. As these new systems came online, the threat of phishing attacks, ransomware, and other cyber-attacks mounted. Levin found that neither native Microsoft 365 security capabilities nor an email filtering tool provided by the firm’s communications partner, were enough to block these threats. Several impersonation attacks snuck past these defenses and it became clear a new solution was required.

"As soon as we started digitizing our business, our risk profile increased exponentially. But the problem in the security market is there are a lot of solutions out there that don’t offer specific components. You often don’t need everything they’re offering. You just need a solution for a specific problem, and ours was email security and filtering. IRONSCALES solved that problem for us.”

Darren Levin CIO, Pres Les

Solution

Pres Les employees receive large volumes of emails from customers and consultants sent as proof of payment, alongside other business-critical communications. Levin, therefore, needed an AI-powered solution to distinguish these legitimate messages from the growing number of phishing and spam emails inundating inboxes. He was also looking for a way for users to report suspicious emails for IT operations to look at—enabling them to remove threats from inboxes and neutralize malicious campaigns.

Pres Les had already partnered with UK-based business consultancy BDO for penetration testing and third-party threat assessments. BDO recommended the IRONSCALES solution to Pres Les in order to enhance email filtering and to identify/remediate advanced phishing attacks. After looking at several alternatives, Levin found they were too expensive for the specific needs of the firm. IRONSCALES’ ease of use and deployment also stood out, and after a proof-of-concept (PoC) trial lasting a couple of weeks, Levin was sold.

 

Outcomes

Pres Les is now protected by leading AI-powered email filtering and advanced phishing detection/remediation capabilities to keep threats out of their end users’ inboxes. Anything suspicious is highlighted and quarantined for the IT team to inspect, while dynamic warning banners help to raise awareness about email threats among users, says Levin. The IRONSCALES platform’s ease of use also extends to administration by Levin and his team, who can now focus on higher-value tasks while the solution works automatically in the background. Since they began using IRONSCALES, Pres Les has already seen improvements across the board—in user awareness, threat protection and IT productivity.

"IRONSCALES was so simple to implement, and even in the POC stage, we could already see how much it improved our filtering. It took no more than an hour to set up using Remote Desktop and Teams. The IRONSCALES team also had recommendations for us—they were very engaged and responsive to our questions. It’s been a brilliant experience and great customer service."

Darren Levin CIO, Pres Les

In a three-month period

402,534

Inspected emails

451

Incidents identified

1,414

Remediated emails

Looking Ahead

With IRONSCALES up and running for several months now, Levin and his team are confident to let it work in the background while they attend to more urgent work. In the meantime, the platform is continually adding new features and improvements.

"The system blacklists email addresses across the whole community as soon as it sees them and then we whitelist emails that we know are relevant. We definitely see more people reporting incidents and, as an IT team, we’re spending less time looking at and deciphering emails, so productivity is increased.”

Darren Levin CIO, Pres Les

About IRONSCALES

IRONSCALES is an API-based email security platform that combines Adaptive AI, agentic automation, and crowdsourced human intelligence to detect and remediate phishing, business email compromise, account takeover, deepfake, and GenAI-powered attacks. The platform deploys in minutes via native API integration for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace with no MX record changes. Beyond threat detection, IRONSCALES includes integrated phishing simulation testing, security awareness training, DMARC management, deepfake protection for Microsoft Teams, and an agentic AI virtual SOC that automates incident response. The platform is powered by a global threat intelligence network of 35,000+ security professionals across 17,000+ organizations and 3,500+ MSP partners. Learn more at ironscales.com.