GWGuardian Keeps Loyola College Protected from Internet-Borne Threats and Ensures Maximum GroupWise Availability
Background
Loyola College is a Jesuit Catholic university in Maryland committed to the ideals of liberal education and the harmonious development of the individual. Students are inspired to learn, lead, and serve in a diverse and changing world. The institution has a commitment to the rich tradition of Catholic education with an emphasis on academic excellence, which translates in a rigorous curriculum and high expectations from the faculty.
An Ever-Growing Messaging Environment
Loyola College is also a Novell stronghold. Students and faculty rely on the GroupWise platform for collaboration. Currently, they are running GroupWise 7 and quite satisfied with the system’s capabilities. As part of the special treatment for attending Loyola College, Loyola alumni get an “email for life”. This means that every student who graduates from the school is entitled to keep his or her institutional email address. As a result of this policy, even though Loyola College has about 7 thousand active undergraduate and graduate students, and 1000 faculty members, the IT Department has to maintain about 34 thousand GroupWise accounts. The number is growing every year.
To sustain such a large email system, it is imperative that the university’s messaging infrastructure is protected from all kinds of security threats so that unsolicited email is eliminated as early as possible to prevent it from bogging down GroupWise unnecessarily.
Protecting the Loyola Messaging System without Hours of Management and Administration
Given the needs for robust and automated protection of its messaging system, the Loyola College IT Department selected Messaging Architects’ GWGuardian to do the job. Prior to its deployment, the school had tested other products, which failed to meet its enterprise-level requirements for total anti-spam and anti-virus protection. GWGuardian was not only the most effective in meeting the school’s needs for security, but it proved to be a GroupWise-specific solution that allowed for eDirectory integration, which was an additional benefit.
David Opitz, Security Analyst, is in charge of firewalls and overall IT security, including anti-virus protection and forensics, at Loyola College. He was also the person in charge of supervising and implementing the GWGuardian deployment at the school. He explains the situation with the end-user experiences of the email system before GWGuardian: “Like any other educational institution, we get a lot of unsolicited email. In fact, about 75% of all the email traffic is spam. You can imagine how frustrating this situation was for the end users. Every day, they would spend 20-30 minutes sifting through their email selecting legitimate email from spam. People constantly complained that they were not being very productive using email. I realized that it was time to do something that would solve the problem.”
At the recommendation of one the IT consultants Loyola College works with, Opitz opted for a clustered GWGuardian appliance in front of the 2 university email gateways. GWGuardian was configured to block viruses and forbidden attachments, while the spam engine was set to the Extreme default setting, with the option for end users to change it according to their preferences. End users are given the ability to access their spam quarantines in two ways: via quarantine reports sent daily to their inboxes or by logging into a web portal and accessing their respective individual spam quarantines in real time. The Helpdesk and Tech services employees aren’t involved in managing the spam quarantines and can devote their time to other infrastructure tasks.
GWGuardian Benefits
“GWGuardian works really well as an anti-spam solution, in addition to providing anti-virus protection and allowing us to filter out risky attachments for another layer of defense,” continues Opitz. “I am certain that we made the right decision with GWGuardian. The admin interface is really easy to maneuver around and I have been taking advantage of all the security options it offers. Realistically, there is very little administration required on my part. I just check the GWGuardian server a couple of times a week, but it’s more to monitor, not manage. It has also brought huge benefits to the end users and has increased their productivity. They can now use email as the productivity-enhancing tool it is meant to be and not devote a large portion of their time to filtering messages.”
“All in all, I would recommend GWGuardian to any organization that needs highly accurate spam protection with minimum human intervention,” concludes Opitz.
