Background
Headquartered in San Francisco, Western Athletic Clubs (WAC) owns and operates private health, fitness, and athletic clubs and sports resorts on the US West Coast. The company's mission is to provide club members with the finest-quality sports and fitness facilities, athletic and mind-body programs, social events, dining experiences and spa amenities. Since opening the first club in 1977, WAC has maintained the highest standards of professional service, earning a reputation as one of the leading private-club companies in the United States.
Email Infrastructure Overview
WAC employs approximately 1,500 people and has a distributed IT environment across 10 separate sites, which are supported by a central IT Department. The email platform for WAC's email infrastructure is Novell GroupWise, which the company has been using ever since email came in use in the 1990s. Each site has its individual domains and Post Offices.
Bruce Sigworth, Director of IT, leads the team of IT engineers responsible for providing company employees with a safe, secure and stable collaboration environment. Email is a critical application for WAC as it is the main medium the staff uses to communicate. In addition, email is the vehicle to keep members informed about ongoing activities and programs at the various Club facilities. Thus, having the right solutions that ensure effective messaging communication in place has been a key objective for the IT department.
For the past six years, WAC has had a relationship with Messaging Architects for its email risk management needs.
Protecting the Corporate Network from Internet-Borne Threats and Malware with Netmail Secure
Western Athletic Clubs deployed Netmail Secure to address email security issues six years ago. The company replaced a pair of McAfee E500 appliances after it brought their email system and network down following a virus outbreak.
"We had to overcome a really bad crisis," Sigworth recalls. "When the virus attack broke out, instead of defaulting to block all messages when they couldn't handle everything, the E500s actually let the viruses through into our network. The consequences for us were a terrible mess to clean up and we were down for a couple of days. At that point we made the decision to switch to more reliable technology. We knew about Messaging Architects' expertise and solutions for GroupWise and decided to test Netmail Secure."
Since Netmail Secure has been in place, there hasn't been any kind of email system downtime or network failure related to internet-borne threats at WAC. "We have been extremely satisfied with Netmail Secure's performance and the protection we are getting from it. It is doing exactly what it is supposed to do and has kept our system clean," continues Sigworth.
The company is using Netmail Secure to its full potential, providing end users with a daily quarantine report of trapped messages, as well as access to their quarantine in real time without any helpdesk intervention.
On a daily basis, between 80 and 90 percent of all email received by WAC is spam or malware, which is blocked by Netmail Secure before it even gets into the corporate messaging system.
The IT department plans on further optimizing email security by upgrading to the fully virtualized Netmail Secure appliance in the coming months. This will result in further hardware and energy cost savings for the organization.
Simplifying Email Lifecycle Management with Netmail Archive
As a private company, Western Athletic Clubs is not mandated to retain email for compliance reasons. Nonetheless, the management made a decision to invest in an email archiving solution to avoid other potential problems that could arise around the company's aggressive growth in recent years.
"While we aren't surrounded by the type of compliance scrutiny organizations from other sectors experience, there are other factors that have an impact on our IT decisions," explains Sigworth. "In the early days, we were a small business and our operations were simpler. Now, as we are looking at acquisitions and growth, we have a much more formalized business model. We wanted to get all of our systems up to standards – that was one driver for rolling out email archiving. We also wanted a simpler solution for email archiving that would allow us to automate the process with minimal overhead."
Before Netmail Archive, the IT department tested a couple of archiving products that didn't meet their needs.
At the beginning they were using a simple archiving tool (Archive to Go) to export and provide email to employees leaving the company. This was far from a comprehensive archiving solution: at the time of an employee's departure, they would create a snapshot in time of their inbox and export it. This approach was both cumbersome and time-consuming without really providing a true historical trail of the archived email.
Another product WAC tried was GWAVA's Retain. Despite extensive efforts by the WAC team, this product proved too unreliable for their needs.
"In hindsight, we should have gone for Netmail Archive from the very beginning, but sometimes it just takes longer to get on the right path," says Sigworth.
Earlier this year, the Messaging Architects professional services team completed the Netmail Archive implementation. Once the initial set-up was done, a schedule to archive the GroupWise data was put in place.
"Because of the sheer volume of data residing in the GroupWise system we had to archive, we staggered the initial pull into nightly jobs. That phase took some time because it was happening after hours as we didn't disrupt business operations."
Once that bulk of data was archived, WAC scheduled to run nightly archiving processes to retain the daily incoming email. The company has an email retention policy according to which email will be retained for 5 years.
The Netmail Archive implementation will result in a considerable improvement of GroupWise performance. The IT staff will now be able to prune down the live message store to messages that are about a year old. The rest of the data will reside in the Netmail Archive repository and will be transparently available to end users without hindering email performance.
Part of the Netmail Archive deployment includes extensive training of the internal IT staff on the product's capabilities during which one of WAC's engineers received extensive training to makes him fully knowledgeable of the new system.
"The overall experience with the professional services team was excellent," concurs Sigworth. "We had a great interaction with the Messaging Architects expert who came out here, he provided a tremendous amount of valuable knowledge. I got regular briefs on the work that was being done and so even though I wasn't directly involved with every phase of the deployment, I felt completely in the loop. The professional services engineer then kept in touch with us for the subsequent phases – all in all a very positive experience."
For Bruce Sigworth the benefits of having an enterprise-class email archiving solution can be summarized in the peace of mind of having a functioning system running in the background without requiring day-to-day management.
"Probably the biggest single thing that impacts us as an organization is having to deal with the turn-over of staff. As a result, I have to constantly clean up a lot of accounts. Knowing that Netmail Archive is in the background taking care of it automatically and all the data is up to date, and all I have to do is export the data, is a huge benefit. With Netmail Archive what I am required to do is a couple of mouse-clicks compared to the multi-hour operations I had to perform before."
Netmail Archive brings considerable savings in terms of time and overhead for WAC's lean IT team.
"Netmail Archive does its job without my having to dedicate manpower to it – that's a big thing," concludes Bruce Sigworth.
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