Cannon School protects themselves with M+Guardian
M+Guardian Protects Cannon's Students from Internet-Borne Threats and Ensures Maximum Uptime for the School's Exchange System
Background
Established in 1969 as Cabarrus Academy, Cannon School got its present name in 1998, as the institution originally occupied the historic Concord residence of textile entrepreneur J.W. Cannon. Over the years, Cannon School has become a preeminent junior kindergarten through grade 12 college preparatory independent school, serving families in central North Carolina. Cannon School provides strong academics, boasts an award-winning character development program, excellent fine arts opportunities, a range of competitive sports, and offers students a safe and friendly learning environment. Campus facilities include approximately 80 classrooms, two media centers, a multi-purpose auditorium, a lecture hall, four computer labs and a technology center, four music suites, three art studios, nine science labs, a full-service dining center, an arts wing, and a dance studio. The school offers a wireless laptop environment and employs technologies, such as email and the internet to fulfill its mission in providing academic excellence and creating well-rounded and highly accomplished individuals. The wireless laptop environment enables upper school students to learn and communicate 24/7. In addition to computer labs, every lower school and middle school classroom has Internet access.
Making Cannon School’s Email Environment Safe and Risk-Free with M+Guardian
Cannon School standardizes on Exchange as an email platform. All faculty, staff and high school students have an institution account. Email plays a significant part in the communication and educational process of the private school. First of all, email is the primary means of communication between staff and parents, which is extremely important. The administrative software the school uses is integrated into Outlook, so all parent email addresses can be accessed through the email client. Moreover, faculty can also easily interact with parents and email has been established as the primary means of contact between them. In the upper school, both the web and email are used extremely intensively between faculty and students for paper submissions, other assignments, and progress reports.
Cannon School has been a Messaging Architects client using Guardian technology for seven years now. In the past the email firewall was protecting their GroupWise system. When they moved to Exchange a few years ago, they continued to provide their students and teachers a risk-free messaging environment with Messaging Architects’ solution.
Director of Technology Systems Rick Strickland remembers, “Right after I joined the school’s IT department I started looking for a product that would cut down on spam and provide content filtering. We had to do something because we were having a really serious spam problem - just like all other schools. At the time, Guardian was really the first product I found that integrated well with GroupWise and, moreover, provided the spam catch rate that was acceptable to us. We put it in and I’ve been ecstatic with the secure gateway since day 1. Prior to its deployment, faculty and staff were constantly calling us to complain about the barrage of spam. As soon as we put the appliance in, the spam literally went away.”
Not too long ago, Cannon School upgraded to the newest version of M+Guardian. “It was a very easy upgrade and I received exceptional help from the engineer dedicated to help me with the project,” says Strickland. M+Guardian’s flexible and highly granular administrative interface allows him to address his end users’ needs quickly and efficiently in the rare cases when they request his help. He also likes the enhanced number of options and choices the new M+Guardian policy engine offers. All email, both inbound and outbound, is scanned by M+Guardian.
During the product walk-through, Strickland annotated things he wanted his staff to implement in order to make the most of the school’s email security.
"The switch was completely transparent. No one at the school even noticed and we never missed a beat. We put the appliance in, transferred all the configurations over, looked at some of the engine enhancements, and it just started working. It’s been running great since we switched over,” Strickland concludes.
