GWGuardian Improves Productivity and Saves Resources for United Physicians
Background
United Physicians, PC is a Physician Organization that serves the professional and economic interests of Beaumont physicians. It provides services that enable its member physicians to focus attention on the performance of high quality medicine in a cost-effective fashion. It negotiates contracts, facilitates credentialing with payers, assists in practice management, optimizes resource utilization of provider services, and looks for opportunities that merge service with financial benefit. As of November 2003, it leverages the power of Novell's GroupWise for its messaging collaboration needs when the IS department deployed a brand new GroupWise configuration running on a Windows 2000 server.
Challenge
As an organization belonging to a regulated industry and dealing with patient-centric data, it was crucial for the IT personnel to secure the messaging infrastructure at the earliest point of email entry. The need for a robust, scalable anti-spam and anti-virus solution was further highlighted by the future, longer-term plans of United Physicians to migrate more of their members to the GroupWise system. The IT department implemented GWGuardian Enterprise Edition, featuring an integrated McAfee AV engine, after the corporation got hit by the Netsky worm in March, 2004. The Netsky virus is a mass-mailing worm that scans users' drives for email addresses and sends itself to those that are found. As a result, all of a sudden United Physicians was flooding client hospitals with thousands of email messages. Something needed to be done quickly and efficiently.
Solution
The deployment of GWGuardian's intelligent, multi-layered anti-spam and anti-virus engine immediately turned things around: the virus infection was contained and the GroupWise system was healed in terms of performance and reliability. "The GWGuardian deployment was easy and intuitive," says Alex Szygowski, Network Administrator of United Physicians. "We trust the product to the point that we have it configured to delete spam immediately. At the same time, we take advantage of the GWGuardian end-user quarantine reporting feature to allow users to manage attachments flexibly. While all attachments are quarantined, users are given the option of reviewing them and having them released when they constitute legitimate documents. The introduction of the GWGuardian email firewall has improved overall system integrity."
Jeffrey J. Noland, Director of Information Services, underlines the increase in employee productivity that GWGuardian has brought to the organization. On the one hand, employees are freed from the nuisance of dealing with unsolicited messages; on the other, the IT personnel is freed from the need to manage spam and viruses. The GWGuardian AV auto-updates ensure that the United Physicians' email system is always protected with the latest McAfee virus definitions. "GWGuardian has saved us countless hours in troubleshooting and problem-solving by blocking dangerous email and viruses. Prior to purchasing the software, we had one of the viruses affect both us and our partner hospital. Since we bought GWGuardian, we are blocking approximately 160 spam messages and 10-25 different types of forbidden attachments and viruses a day," he continues.
Jeffrey J. Noland concludes, "GWGuardian is a great time and money saver for us. We are extremely pleased and completely satisfied with your product - and so are our users."
Jeffrey J. Noland
Director of Information Services
United Physicians, PC
