City of Casa, Grande, AZ

Protecting the City's Email Infrastructure

M+Guardian Ensures Superior Protection of the Email Infrastructure and Minimum IT Overhead for the City of Casa Grande, AZ.

Background
Founded in 1879, Casa Grande synthesizes the amenities of a modern city with the heritage and values of a traditional community. The City of Casa Grande Information Technology Department supports all computer and telecommunication for all the City departments, including the Novell GroupWise collaboration system. Just like any other public agency, the majority of the email traffic that goes into the municipal email system consists of spam. Thanks to M+Guardian, these unwanted and often dangerous messages don’t even enter the City of Casa Grande’s messaging system.

Ensuring Email Security with the Least Possible Overhead
Like most public organizations, the City of Casa Grande relies on the internet and its collaboration system for efficient interaction with the community. Thus, ensuring that the legitimate email flow isn’t congested by spam or viruses is a major priority for the IS Department.

After using the GWGuardian email firewall for a few years, earlier this year the IT department upgraded to the new M+Guardian appliance, Messaging Architects’ Linux-based appliance which was also designed along the fire-and-forget approach. M+Guardian also features application-level clustering that guarantees superior performance and scalability. In the case of the City of Casa Grande, two clustered M+Guardian appliances were deployed to ensure extremely fast throughput for zero latency message processing.

Lana Gibson, Network Administrator at the City of Casa Grande responsible for the municipal email system, was in charge of the upgrade. “We are very pleased with the assistance we received from Messaging Architects to ensure the project was a success. They made sure the appliances were running correctly after we had made some needed changes to our infrastructure. We really appreciate their readiness to work around our schedule.”

What was really appealing to Gibson was also the fact that M+Guardian is a Linux-based appliance that comes preconfigured. “The GWGuardian box was aging and this was affecting its performance. When we were offered the option of a self-contained appliance that already came preconfigured with our settings, I was sold on it right away. The fact that it is Linux-based is a big plus for us – it just works and we don’t have to worry about anything. M+Guaradian works very well. I am also very pleased to be able to get a lot of information on email traffic through the numerous dashboards. Thus, I know what’s happening to the messaging system at any moment in real time.”

For the administrator, one of the M+Guardian’s benefits is its intuitive admin interface. “What I really like about the product is that I don’t have to sit down and read a book before I could use M+Guardian. It was quite easy and logical to see how the different pieces are related, which I think is an improvement from the previous version we were using.”

Gibson was also very aware of the budgetary aspect when making the decision to upgrade. “Like most local government agencies, budget is always a concern and we found the price for the M+Guardian appliance very reasonable. Besides, the units themselves are compact and we were able to free up a lot of space in the server room.”

To improve IT productivity and give her employees greater flexibility, Gibson is taking full advantage of the M+Guardian quarantine features. The end users are being trained to manage their own block and safe lists, as well as their spam quarantine. This frees up the IT staff’s time and gives the employees the ability to see what is being trapped and select the type of email they wish to receive or reject. Gibson continues, “We are training our end users on using the M+Guardian features optimally and they are getting better at it every day. It’s funny, at the beginning there was a misconception that they had to clean up their spam quarantine. It took some time to explain that there is no need to do this, as these actions are all automated by M+Guardian. In any case, people know right away if for some reason the M+Guardian engine stops working and they are very appreciative of how well it protects them day in and day out.”

Gibson concludes, “The Messaging Architects Guardian technology has been quite good for the city. M+Guardian is working very well. It is a really nice product that will free up a lot of our time and has given our end users more freedom in their day-to-day email use.”