GWGuardian Provides Superior Protection against Spam and Viruses to Lithia Motors’ 100% Exchange Environment
Background
Lithia offers 26 brands of new domestic and imported vehicles, all makes of used vehicles, service and parts, and finance/insurance. With 104 stores in 43 markets in 15 states in the Western and Midwestern United States and total revenue of over $2.94 billion, Lithia Motors, Inc. is one of the largest full-service new vehicle retailers in the country.5 Exchange servers deployed at the company headquarters in Medford, Oregon, handle the collaboration of about 4500 employees across the 105 company locations. Since 2004, Lithia has been using GWGuardian as its messaging firewall to protect its system from email-borne threats and unwanted messages.
Finding the Right Solution for the Lithia Motors Messaging Infrastructure
The average monthly email traffic volume at Lithia is between 600,000 and 750,000 email messages of which approximately 50% is spam. Prior to deploying GWGuardian in front of their Exchange farm, Lithia was using a different anti-spam software, which required a lot of manual intervention and time-consuming rule creation that needed to be constantly updated and tweaked. The product wasn’t very accurate in terms of spam catch rates and often false positives were trapped in the quarantine. The process of finding these trapped messages in the spam quarantine was very difficult and in the end became the driving factor for the IT department to look for a replacement.
Dan McGuire, Systems Manager at Lithia, is in charge of all Windows environments, including the organization’s Exchange servers. He explains the immediate impact the GWGuardian implementation had on IT overhead and productivity: “Incorporating GWGuardian into our email system dramatically reduced the administration overhead and brought a visible improvement in the amount of spam caught before it even came into the system. We started with a 30-day trial and it just worked. The automatic spam updates started as soon as we turned Guardian on and no manual baby-sitting was required. But what really impressed me was the ease with which I could find the spam messages trapped for a particular individual. Given the limited resources of our IT department at the time it was only myself in charge of the email system – finding a self-managing solution, such as Guardian was a great advantage.”
Dan McGuire: "The biggest benefit of Guardian is that it does catch spam!"
What was even better was the fact that Guardian allowed McGuire to fully transfer the quarantine management to the respective users, while he could dedicate himself to more important tasks related to the Windows environment. The quarantine reports sent directly into the end users mailboxes and the web-based portal for real-time access to their quarantine allowed Lithia employees the flexibility they needed to access their spam quarantine as often as they needed to. Meanwhile, the administering Guardian was quick and easy for McGuire, who now spends less than an hour a week on the solution, going through the logs and making sure that everything is working as it should.
McGuire continues: “The switch to Guardian was very positive for us. Based on my conversations with people from other companies, Guardian definitely outperforms the majority of other products. The logs make it very simple to check if email is passing through or not. And the fire-and-forget approach of Guardian is great; at Lithia we really need to have applications that are pretty automatic to be able to manage our 130 plus servers with only three admins. However, in the end, the biggest benefit of this product compared to a lot of other ones on the market is simply the fact that it does catch spam and it has made me one of your biggest advocates,” concludes McGuire.
