GWGuardian Ensures Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia Spam- and Virus-Free Environment
With about 900 employees, more than 9,250 students, close to 30 different degrees offered and more than 12 locations around Helsinki, Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia is one of Finland’s largest applied science polytechnics. With three faculties, Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia provides vocational training in the fields of culture, healthcare, social services and technology.
Over 10,000 teachers, students and other employees use the GroupWise system for their email traffic. Spam and viruses posed a huge problem for the email environment of the institution. Heimo Järkkä, system engineer at Helsinki Polytechnic, explains: "50% of all incoming email was spam; we received thousands of spam messages per day. It was really slowing down our 2 GroupWise servers and end users had real problems because all this unsolicited email used to go directly into their mailboxes. It took a lot of time to clean up this 'junk'. Before GWGuardian we were using Guinevere, but it couldn’t handle this amount of spam. We chose GWGuardian from Messaging Architects because of the product’s tight integration with Novell GroupWise and eDirectory. In addition, we like its multi-layered architecture which guarantees superior anti-spam and anti-virus protection. Our decision to go with GWGuardian was primarily based on its ease of integration into our architecture, as well as the security features the solution offers when we compare it to other available solutions."
Tomi Moberg, specialist in Novell and Messaging Architects business partner for Finland, explains how GWGuardian is used: "After Helsinki Polytechnic Stadia chose for GWGuardian, we implemented the spam filter and virus scanning for both incoming viruses AND attachments and 2 GWGuardian gateways for fault tolerance. The size of installation was considerable, over 10,000 users! Therefore we installed 2 GWGuardian servers to ensure that all faculties, teachers, students and other employees were protected from internet-borne threats all the time."
Järkkä continues: "The first time we deployed GWGuardian, it took us about a day, but just a few days ago we upgraded to the latest GWGuardian software and the procedure took only fifteen minutes! It was really effortless because we made a backup of all our configurations which we restored once the GWGuardian upgrade was completed. This approach made our life really easy."
Katri Kesälahti, systems engineer and one of Järkkä’s colleagues, adds: "Usually we turn to the consultants from LGF for help with installations, but last time we did the upgrade to GWGuardian version 4 by ourselves. I can honestly say that this solution significantly decreased the overhead of our mail system and secure mail delivery has now become our standard! End users are certainly the biggest winners because they don’t get bothered by junk mail anymore. There is no fear of contaminated attachments. We can now use Real-Time Blacklists to block most of the incoming spam. If spam gets through in spite of that, we have strong content scanning and the quarantined suspect email is also scanned for viruses and worms by the GWGuardian AV module. Overall, we are very satisfied with the use of GWGuardian as it has really helped us solve our problems concerning spam and viruses by eliminating them once and for all from our GroupWise system."
