"People don't notice when there is an improvement...for installing IronPort, however, we've had nothing but praise."  Craig Warren, Operational Service Provision Manager.

Challenge

Deakin University is located at five campuses across Melbourne, Geelong and Warrnambool, with 32,000 students, 4,500 staff and up to 1,000 others.  The University was subject to increasing volumes of spam. 

"The unwanted messages penetrating our sites had become not only a time-wasting issue but also a social and compliance issue, given the offensive nature of much of the material," said Craig Warren.  "This was of particular concern to the 40 per cent of our professional and mature age students who were able to compare our protection against unwanted emails, with the protection they experienced at their workplaces."

Craig Warren's operation needed to dedicate a full-time support person to manage the email infrastructure and handle email-related complaints from users.

IT Environment

The University's barricade of four Linux email servers running anti-virus and spam filtering software in a round robin, the spam continued to break through.

"The previous arrangement had served us well for about three years but the spammers were steadily beating us.  We were continually spending time fine tuning our detection and prevention," said Craig Warren.

Solution

Two IronPort C300 email security appliances were installed to address technical, wasted time and compliance issues.  The deployment includes IronPort Virus Outbreak Filters to provide a critical first layer of defense against new virus outbreaks.  The filters identify new outbreaks many hours before the signatures provided by traditional anti-virus solutions are in place and offer an extremely high catch rate with near zero misclassifications.

Business Impact

The overhead of a staff member managing email problems is gone, immediately saving Deakin $60,000 a year.  Deakin's email service is always on 24x7 and the usage logs show that the incidence of unwanted messages per user has declined from an average of 245 per week to fewer than a handful.  This level of blocking significantly reduced network load and storage capacity needs.

The solution has also served to raise the appreciation of the University's IT Services Division in the opinion of users not to mention it has protected the institution's fine reputation.