Blackpool and the Fylde College incorporate M+Guardian to secure virtualized email infrastructure

Contributed by Pierre Chamberland (Dienstag, 31 August 2010) | Category : Email messaging trends

More than a year ago, Blackpool and the Fylde College, an institution that is part of Lancester University and is well known for its diverse programs, turned to Messaging Architects to help secure its virtualized email infrastructure.

The school, which is home to nearly 15,000 students and an academic and support staff of 1,500, employs a fully virtualized IT infrastructure that is built on the VMware vSphere platform. All of the institution's applications function in this virtual environment, including its collaborative messaging system, Novel GroupWise. The school has four different campuses spread throughout the country, which all run on one managed network.

To deal with capacity issues, the school offers email addresses with its domain name to students and staff for academic purposes only. "We have a tightly integrated system that largely works without problems. The academic email address is exclusively used for academic purposes," said Simon Bailey, an IT administrator that oversees the college's entire network. "This allows the staff to be sure they're targeting enrolled individuals. The institution controls traffic of the academic email. Students use their personal email for social interactions outside the College."

While this process continued for each new class and staff member every year, the IT administration was using Guinevere, an open source product, as its anti-spam solution to prevent any infiltration or infection. As time went on, however, the IT department found this be increasingly problematic, as it became less reliable with the growing volume of emails being sent and received, as well as the total amount of spam circulating the web.

"It really got to the point where we had to move to an alternative product," Bailey said. "Spam was causing a huge headache for senior managers, especially with inappropriate and offensive messages. We needed to find [a] ... solution that would make the problem go away as quickly as possible."

To ensure better email security, the school found its low-maintenance and efficient anti-spam solution in Messaging Architects' M+Guardian. Immediately, the school noticed a difference in regard to spam levels. "From the start, the amount of spam removed by M+Guardian was staggering," said Bailey.

During its sample period of 26 days, the College received nearly 1.5 million emails - 90 percent of which was spam that M+Guardian successfully caught. After fully adopting the solution, IT administrators have raved about its filtering engines that are highly accurate with catching spam and its flexibility to configure to the different needs of various staff members. "Some users want to receive daily quarantine reports, while others don't want to be bothered because they just trust the solution," said Bailey. "And I just don't hear reports of false positives. This is a very strong recommendation indeed." Furthermore, M+Guardian required no daily administration from the IT staff, which freed them up to focus on other pressing issues.

Thus, adoption of M+Guardian allowed the college to securely continue its virtualized email environment - a technology tactic Gartner has praised. Recently, Gartner analyst Bill Pray wrote a blog highlighting the benefits of email virtualization, stating it provides better costs, improved management and "better resiliency [to] underscore the business case for virtualization."

With some companies or organizations still suffering the effects of the global recession, cost-effective solutions for regular IT functions have become popular. Adopting a virtualized email environment and adding low-cost and reliable anti-spam filters, such as the Blackpool and the Fylde College example, could help these affected companies find cheaper, effective messaging alternatives.