"We benefited from 'set and forget' security which continues to be simple to manage and highly effective."  Geoff Edmonds, IT Director

Challenge

The council is situated just north-east of Melbourne, boasting a population of 60,600.  It has around 367 staff across 7 sites.  Security was a growing concern for the council.  With very strict audit requirements they needed a solution that would accommodate this.

IT Environment

In terms of security the council had an ageing software-based firewall.  To control unsolicited email they had resourced a staff member to administer email for 3 hours per day.  This labour intensive task meant managing quarantine manually, checking what the old solution had flagged as spam.

Solution

They upgraded to an appliance for security which had also provided them with a Tipping Point Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) from 3Com. 

The 3Com appliance is fast, secure and reliable.  A combined IPS and firewall, it provides comprehensive protection against worms, trojans, viruses, denial of service attacks, Voice over IP threats, spyware, phishing and threats in Peer-to-Peer file sharing.  Importantly for councils, it provides live reporting tools to satisfy audit and compliance issues.

The solution also included an IronPort Systems (Cisco) C100 Email filtering appliance.  The IronPort C100 provides advanced threat prevention, blocks spam and viruses and enable corporate email policy enforcement.  As soon as the appliance was installed, council was able to identify 81 per cent of incoming emails as spam!

Business Impact

End-users are not bogged down by spam, viruses or other threats and high accuracy is maintained through continuous and automatic rule updates thanks to the reputation filters.

This combined solution means that their security is now very tight.  They are protected against current and future threats.  They have no false positives on spam, with the appliance guaranteeing a false positive rate of never more than 1:1 million.

What's more, through sophisticated management, monitoring and reporting tools, they are able to satisfy the strict audit and compliance issues to which the council is subject.

The cyberhack problem is perpetual and escalating. The only solution is a technology that protects against problems before they are created.  The council now has a system that provides the following benefits:

• It stops the threat before it can enter their network
• They save time- no need for emergency and ad-hoc patching, or damage repair from attacks.
• They reclaim bandwidth - stop their links carrying unwanted traffic.
• They get the most comprehensive security for critical applications and infrastructure including protection against worms, trojans, viruses, denial of service attacks, Voice over IP threats, spyware, phishing and threats in Peer-to-Peer file sharing.
• This is the only solution that will protect against new attacks