Formel D: Case Study
Interview with Thomas Strecker, Head of IT, on the M+Guardian Upgrade and the M+Archive Implementation
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M+Guardian, M+Archive, and M+SecureStore enable Formel D to simplify email management, improve GroupWise performance and dramatically reduce their message store volume. |
Case Study
Objective: Simplify email management, improve GroupWise performance, and dramatically reduce message store volume using M+Guardian, M+Archive, and M+SecureStore.
Company Background
The Formel D group is an internationally working premium service provider for the automobile and supplier industry. Every day 1220 Formel D employees worldwide offer our customers demand-oriented and innovative solutions around the production process. Formel D engages employees with 45 different nationalities, who speak 45 languages.
Context & Requirements
Thomas Strecker, head of the IT Department at Formel D, explains in detail the recently completed refresh of the organization's email infrastructure:
"For four years, we have been using M+Guardian successfully as our anti-spam and anti-virus solution after replacing TrendMicro. We chose M+Guardian to replace the previous product because of its directory services integration and the flexible, role-based policy engine. Since then, the M+Guardian pre-configured policies have enabled our GroupWise email system to run very reliably. We are in a position to monitor all internal and external email for viruses and to scan the content. Our end users are very satisfied with the ability to manage a lot of their personal options.
"We decided that during the scheduled M+Guardian upgrade, we would also add another cluster to handle the higher volumes of email traffic. In addition, we were looking for a market-leading archiving solution to deploy in our messaging environment. The need for centralized archiving became evident as the growth of data in our GroupWise environment has been reaching over 30% annually. The ever-growing amount of data in the GroupWise system spanned the past 11 years. As a result, we have been running out of SAN storage space and the backup times have been increasing progressively. New business standards and different legal requirements at our 43 offices in 26 different countries compelled us to look for a highly flexible role-based email archiving solution that in addition to dealing with storage optimization would also meet regulatory compliance and legal mandates."
M+Guardian Upgrade and M+Archive Implementation
"The new features of M+Guardian, including the advanced content filtering of incoming and outgoing email will continue to protect our GroupWise system from dangerous attacks and data leaks. As new virus and spam threats continue to evolve, the three different M+Guardian scanning engines keep us protected. In addition, M+Guardian's new Web server technology, the dashboards and the flexible access to the spam quarantine by end users simplify email management for us. By adding an extra cluster, we will achieve high availability and load balancing.
"The M+Archive implementation has allowed us to achieve the second objective in our email infrastructure consolidation project: deploying centralized email archiving that will enable us to streamline storage and be able to search and retrieve archived data quickly and easily. The email archives have been offloaded to the M+SecureStore system and no longer need to reside in the GroupWise message store. This move has improved the performance of the email system; at the same time, all archived email is indexed making eDiscovery a quick and painless process. Our international communications with customers, partners and colleagues is recorded completely and comes with a detailed audit trail. This means that all email is retained in compliance not only with the internal company guidelines but also with the acting legislation within the EU and the individual countries."
Feedback after the Successful Implementation
"On average about 50.000 daily emails are scanned by M+Guardian, of which on average 87% are stopped as spam, viruses or malware. The new M+Guardian web-based administrative interface offers useful and flexible functionality, as well as detailed reporting. A new extremely useful feature of the new M+Guardian is the attachment stripping functionality that is available through M+SecureStore. This option allows for incoming attachments to be removed from incoming emails and replaced by a link at the SMTP gateway based on a specific email policy. This enables us to store the attachments on the M+SecureStore system so GroupWise is not burdened with that data.
"Our team participated in the implementation and configuration of M+Archive to set up centralized email archiving. Messaging Architects provided a training session to help us in define the retention policies for individual user groups within the organization. We were impressed at how much we were able to reduce the size of the live GroupWise message store. Unimportant and old email messages were easily offloaded to the archive repository and this resulted in a reduction of the volume of data in the GroupWise system by 64%."
Client Care and Support from Messaging Architects
"Our experience with the Messaging Architects Global Support team was always positive. The opening of the Messaging Architects local sales office and the support from their Gold Partner GNE-IT Business Solutions, who carried out the implementations, have provided an even higher level of care to our organization."
If you have further questions regarding the M+Guardian and M+Archive implementations at Formel D, we will be happy to put you in touch with the right contact. Please submit your inquiries to anika.wuestner@messagingarchitects.com.
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