"In addition to saving hours a day of staff time...we don't have server costs assicated with other email security solutions."  Mark Cilia, IT Manager

Challenge

Hobson's Bay City Council in Southern Victoria, located at the end of Port Phillip Bay.  Security was a growing concern for the council.  With very strict audit requirements they needed a solution that would accommodate this.  A lot of incoming emails that contained images such as building plans, were blocked by the previous solution which meant their single help desk manager was spending hours sifting through spam for legitimate mail.

"Essentially, the IT team was playing the role of email police.  Under our Service Level Agreements, we had 30 minutes to get any quarantined email through to the specified recipient," said Mark Cilia.

IT Environment

A software-based firewall was providing inadequate protection.

Solution

They installed a Tipping Point Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) from 3Com.

The IPS appliance is fast, secure and reliable.  A combined IPS and firewall, it provides comprehensive protection against worms, trojans, viruses, denial of service attacks, IP telephony 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.

In addition, after a successful 2-week trial they also installed two IronPort C100 email security appliances to assist the IT department to meet its SLAs by reducing mail routing times. The IronPort C100 provides advanced threat prevention, blocks spam and viruses and enables corporate email policy enforcement.  As soon as the appliance was installed, council was able to identify more than 80 per cent of incoming emails as spam!

The IT team was so confident about the C100's performance, that it was installed without being run in parallel with the existing security device.  The team also did not announce it was switching to a new security appliance.

"No emails were lost, no one missed anything," said Mark Cilia.  "We have complete confidence that the C100's Reputation Filters will stop any emails that are from a 'garbage' source."

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.  Now the help-desk member spends less than 15 minutes per day on any emails that don't match the C100's quarantine business rules, and is now free to focus exclusively on help-desk enquiries.  In addition, end-users are receiving their emails much faster as the C100 does not stop emails with images unless flagged.

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.

In addition to saving hours a day of staff time, because the C100 is not software-based, they don't have the server costs associated with other email security solutions.

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