Metropolitan Community College
Securing the College's Email Firewall
Protecting faculty, staff and students at Metropolitan Community College of Kansas City from spam and viruses with Messaging Architects’ secure email firewall
Executive Summary
Metropolitan Community College of Kansas City, MO, consists of six separate locations across Kansas City with a total of over 4300 faculty and staff and about 25,000 students. MCC has been recognized throughout the USA for the excellence and innovation of the academic programs. Every student enrolled in a college program is granted an email account, which is then kept active for an indefinite period of time, as students often come back to school at a later period in their life. Over the past 3 years, MCC has been protecting its messaging infrastructure from spam, viruses, and other internet-borne threats with Messaging Architects’ Advanced Email Firewall. Recently, they upgraded their system to the Linux-based appliance that was released at the beginning of the year.
Background
To manage successfully the growing volume of email traffic and the number of individual email accounts, MCC relies on Novell GroupWise and NetMail. The 4300 faculty and staff email users spread over 6 locations across Kansas City use GroupWise for collaboration and messaging. They use their email account extensively; in fact, for a lot of them this is their only email account. This means that their email is regularly used for personal matters; this means that they are potentially opening themselves up for a lot of spam. On top of that, a total of 150,000 student accounts are also maintained on a separate NetMail system. About 25 thousand of these accounts represent the active student population on 6 campuses. The remaining accounts belong to former students whose email accounts are kept active even after the students leave. So on this end there is also a lot of potential for spam.
Finding the Right Anti-Spam Solution
Before selecting the Messaging Architects’ solution, MCC went through a variety of security products. The main obstacle they came across was the fact that none of the solutions was able to support both the NetMail and the GroupWise systems. They would work with one or the other but never both of them together. It was going to be costly to get different solutions for each messaging environment, as well as a pain from an administrative point of view to manage two systems. Another problem was the fact that some of the products ran on the GroupWise server itself. This was not an effective approach to spam since it didn’t prevent it from entering our system. In addition, the fact that the product was dependent on GWIA resulted in problems during GroupWise upgrades. Finally, the previous products did not offer a viable method for the users to monitor their own accounts. Users didn’t have an effective way to access their quarantines.
Solving the Spam Problem with Messaging Architects’ Advanced Email Firewall
Brad Frisch, Network Engineer at MCC, in charge of the GroupWise and NetMail systems at MCC, came across GWGuardian during Novell BrainShare and realized that this was a solution with considerable benefits for both his institution and himself as the IT professional in charge of the collaboration system. As soon as they deployed the solution, the situation dramatically improved. The complaints from end users disappeared overnight. On a weekly basis, MCC receives around 10,000 spam messages on each system. Student accounts in particular are especially susceptible to spam and other threats. On a weekly basis the Messaging Architects’ Guardian appliance also traps numerous virus attachments and other threats. After the success of the initial deployment, eventually, the IT department granted faculty, staff and students access to their quarantines and the flexibility to manage their trusted and block lists. The response from end users was extremely positive. For the administrators, this has been an excellent solution with very positive effect on the productivity of the IT staff, as well, since they no longer have to go into individual accounts and ensure that email is released.
Migrating to a Linux-Based Appliance
Earlier this year, MCC decided to take another step in their security configuration. Following a general IT decision to migrate onto the Linux OS for all applications, including their messaging systems, Frisch implemented a migration to the M+Guardian appliance. They are using a 3-node cluster to ensure uninterrupted email availability. The email administrators are particularly happy with M+Guardian’s true application-level clustering since this means that they don’t have to worry about the appliances ever going down and stopping the flow of email. Since M+Guardian offers intelligent software-based clustering, it makes no difference which node goes down as the other two nodes automatically take over. M+Guardian’s built-in clustering has also allowed MCC to replace the two separate GWGuardian servers for the GroupWise and NetMail systems, respectively, by a single M+Guardian cluster, which successfully manages the message flow of both systems from a single location. Another benefit they are enjoying with the new M+Guardian appliance is the multi-level virus protection.
For Frisch the completely web-based Administrative interface of the new appliance is a further advantage as it allows him the freedom to connect from anywhere where there is an internet connection. “I would definitely recommend the Messaging Architects security gateway to any organization with a large number of email users, especially when the IT staff has a lot of responsibilities and little bandwidth to deal with managing filters and spam quarantines. Selecting GWGuardian improved the performance of our email servers, potentially saved us a lot of security-related headaches, dramatically raised the level of satisfaction of our faculty and students, and unquestionably freed up a huge amount of my time to dedicate to the other tasks in my mandate. The new M+Guardian platform offers an additional set of enhancements that ensure that our messaging infrastructure is fully protected with the most advanced technology on the market today,” concludes Frisch.
