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Background
Fort Sill Bank was established in 1946 by J. R. "Dolph" Montgomery, who had the vision to provide a full service bank able to meet the special banking needs of Fort Sill’s military personnel. Since then, Fort Sill National Bank (FSNB) had has a 60-year tradition of distinguished banking service to both the military and civilian communities. Over a thousand employees in 62 branches are dedicated to ensuring every customer receives immediate and outstanding service, thus continuing FSNB’s legacy as a leader in military banking and customer service.
The Challenge: Ensuring top performance for FSNB’s Exchange infrastructure while streamlining IT operations
In early 2009, a decision was made to standardize on Microsoft Windows as the operating systems across the enterprise. As part of the mandate, in April 2009, FSNB migrated from Novell GroupWise to a Microsoft Exchange collaboration environment.
"The migration to a total Windows-based environment leveraging Active Directory and the Exchange email server was a business decision that aimed at standardizing IT operations at FSNB," explains Raymond Reynolds, IT Manager at FSNB.
At the time of the migration, the FSNB IT Department decided to approach the project from the broader perspective of email risk management. They wanted to deploy the necessary controls that would not only optimize the performance of the Exchange infrastructure, but also address content filtering, data-leak prevention, email retention and internal auditing. The goal was to select a comprehensive solution that would enable the IT staff to meet these requirements with no manual intervention and minimal helpdesk overhead.
"It was also important for us to find a total solution that would address email content filtering, retention, and storage of internal and external data in an automated way without the risk of losing data because of limitations of the software," adds Reynolds.
The decision to go with Messaging Architects was calculated and deliberate. FSNB selected Messaging Architects M+ Security and Compliance Suite because it offers an integrated solution for inbound and outbound content filtering, email archiving, real-time auditing and eDiscovery. In addition, because both M+Guardian and M+Archive work seamlessly with Microsoft Exchange, employees have the ability to easily access email records through the familiar Outlook interface without further training or any helpdesk intervention.
“During the selection process, we evaluated several vendors,” continues Reynolds. “We looked at the cost, the technology and what technical support could do for us. What impressed us was how the Messaging Architects team interfaced with us and the recommendations they made based on a deep understanding of our specific organizational needs.”
Following the deployment of the new Exchange collaboration system, FSNB proceeded with the roll-out of M+Guardian and M+Archive to address email content filtering, retention, and storage of internal and external data in an automated way without the risk of losing data.
According to Reynolds, “Messaging Architects’ software works and does exactly what the vendor said it would without our organization having to purchase additional add-ons! Our investment in Messaging Architects’ products reduced both email risks and email management costs.”
M+Guardian: Solid Defense against External Threats and Internal Data Leaks
Email is the backbone application for communication at FSNB. Thus, one of the IT department’s critical requirements was to be able to provide its employees a safe, secure email environment without the risk of data leaks. On average, the bank’s corporate email system processes 2,500 email messages daily, of which 62% represent spam or other security risks.
Having a solid email gateway to prevent unwanted and potentially harmful messages from reaching the bank employees is crucial. Equally important is the ability to prevent sensitive or private information from leaving the organization through the email system.
FSNB is able to accomplish both with M+Guardian. The solution intelligently filters and blocks inbound and outbound email according to people’s roles and responsibilities based on automated corporate usage policies, dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of managing email security.
Reynolds sums up the role M+Guardian plays for FSNB’s Exchange environment: “We rely on M+Guardian as our first line of defense; it represents the soldier in the foxhole fighting the battle and taking care of us. M+Guardian is the real platform protecting the integrity of our email infrastructure.”
End users are extremely satisfied with the flexibility they have to manipulate their spam quarantine settings. The daily quarantine report has improved their productivity by eliminating the annoying distraction of single-message notification.
“In the past, we had another anti-spam product that would notify our users every time a message was trapped,” remembers Reynolds. “Just imagine how many times an hour our employees would get such notifications interrupting the course of daily business activities. This aggravation went away with the daily M+Guardian quarantine report. We have the report going out late in the afternoon, at a time that is minimally intrusive. Each employee can then review it and take actions, if needed, without spending the majority of the day worrying about quarantine management.”
M+Archive: Cost-effective and Comprehensive Compliance, Internal ePolicy Enforcement and eDiscovery
As a financial institution FSNB belongs to a highly regulated industry and this fact is reflected in the organization’s attention to email retention. Following the guidelines from regulators, FSNB has adopted a three-year 100% retention rate that is implemented through the tight integration between M+Archive and Exchange. All archived email is indexed and stored on the banks’ centralized archive repository.
“Every internal and external incoming or outbound email is captured by M+Archive,” confirms Raymond.
Since the implementation of M+Archive, 22 GB of email data has been offloaded from the live Exchange servers. However, the data remains fully available to end users through their Outlook clients without impacting the performance of the Exchange servers.
In addition to solving the email retention requirements for the bank, M+Archive also enables FSNB’s supervisors to perform real-time auditing without having to resort to bank’s helpdesk.
According to Reynolds, "M+Archive’s auditing capabilities has been a real life-saver for us. Regular auditing of the appropriate use of corporate email system is part of the routine internal auditing processes at FSNB."
Prior to M+Archive, this was a cumbersome process that required supervisors to request email exchanges between employees from the helpdesk staff. The deployment of M+Archive solved this problem and allowed supervisors greater auditing flexibility without the need for intervention from the IT helpdesk.
So far, FSNB has been spared the need to provide records for eDiscovery, whether in case of litigation or internal investigation. However, Reynolds and his IT staff are pleased that with M+Archive they are proactively prepared should the requirement arise. They are also acutely aware of the savings in terms of time and efforts M+Archive is providing.
“In the past, we experienced a server failure that brought our email system down. We had assumed we would need 5-6 hours to restore the Post Offices back to live. In reality, because of the enormous amount of data residing on the email server, this turned into a 30-hour nightmare that was labor-intensive and required the efforts of my entire IT department. Thanks to M+Archive, we are able to keep our Exchange servers highly available to provide our employees and customers the level of service they’ve come to expect from us,” concludes Reynolds.
The Bottom Line: Effective and Compliant End-to-End Email Lifecycle Management
By deploying Messaging Architects Security and Compliance suite, FSNB is able to deliver cost-effective end-to-end lifecycle management of the entire Exchange infrastructure with minimal IT overhead. The end result is that Fort Sill Bank has succeeded in providing a high-performing collaborative environment and streamlining IT operations without compromising email security, compliance and end-user flexibility.
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