The Municipality of Gerona, which employs 800 public workers that serve about 94,000 people in the Catalan city, uses email as the key tool for their daily operations. For the past five years, the organization had been using Trend Micro’s InterScan Messaging Security Suite. However, recently the solution was not performing as it was expected to, and did not succeed in preventing Spam from entering the employees’ mailboxes. The head of IT services of the Municipality of Gerona, Paco Berta, indicates that "Trend Micro’s solution, with its ups and downs, had been working well, but lately we were not satisfied with its performance."
"Some of our mailboxes are public and published on the website and some are private and belong to the employees. About four percent of the emails we received were Spam." It should be noted that, while the organization’s IT services are centralized in the City Hall these services are given to about 35 branches in the area, which are connected by fiber optics.
In response, the Municipality began searching for a solution to solve this problem. "We wanted a device that would improve the detection rate of spam, which would integrate with our Active Directory and also allow easy management. The fact that the level of spam detection in the previous solu-tion was not satisfactory, forced us to manually configure rules for specific types of emails, a fact that significantly complicated the administration."
Controllable costs
After deciding to search for a better solution, "we looked at Trend Micro’s new generation solution, as well as other vendors, including IronPort, Spa-mina, GFI and PineApp." The Municipality’s study focused specifically on the technologies applied against spam, and concluded that "both IronPort,Spamina and GFI’s products, could provide an improved solution, however, PineApp’s offer included not only a top-of-the-line technology, but also a more cost effective solution which did not require a per user license. This allowed the costs to become more predictable and controllable," argues Berta.
“This point was very crucial to us, given that the Municipality’s rate of emails per mailbox was
quite low (about 7,000 incoming emails and 2,000-3,000 outgoing emails for 1,500 users) and
therefore, did not justify purchasing a solution which charges per user.
There were several other factors which were in favor of PineApp’s Mail-SeCure 3021 solution
that was acquired through the distributer Ingecom and the integrator Abast Systems; Mail-
SeCure also had other useful features, such as the ability to receive Daily Reports and Personal
Black and Whitelists."
This project involved an investment of just over 9,000 Euros. The solution was installed in the
Municipality’s DMZ, in front of Stonesoft StoneGate firewall. "The purchase decision was made
in late December 2009. The implementation took place in January 2010 and lasted only a couple
of hours. The solution was completely “plug-and-play”, as it was effective from the very begin-
ning, and provided a very satisfactory Spam detection level, "said Berta.
One of the Municipality’s email administrators stated that "we have managed to eliminate almost
all spam, which is now anecdotal. Moreover, we now have a feature that allows users to manage
their own white and blacklists. This feature gives us great peace of mind in terms of false posi-
tives and reduces the administrative workload."
Looking to the future, although the current budget constraints, the Municipality does not rule out
the possibility of purchasing a second unit from PineApp in order to provide high availability in
this environment and also purchasing an email archiving solution.
About Mail-SeCure 3020
Mail-SeCure 3000 series appliances protect midsize businesses’ networks from both targeted and non-targeted email-related threats. Mail-SeCureTM is equipped with cutting-edge perimeter security engines that focus on stopping the vast majority of threats by looking at the credibility of their sources before they penetrate the customer’s network. PineApp’s pe-rimeter security approach helps save a substantial amount of system resources previously wasted on unnecessary
content inspections. Mail-SeCure provides system administrators with the tools to handle both email-borne threats and a variety of email-related administrative tasks.
About PineApp
PineApp is a leading security solution provider for Information Technology. PineApp offers comprehensive email security, email archiving and web filtering solutions that are available as an appliance or software (on a server or VMware platform). PineApp’s solutions are also available for service providers (ISPs) who wish to offer Cloud-Managed-Services and a DRP (Disaster Recovery Plan) solution to their customers.Founded in 2002, PineApp is headquartered in Israel, with branch offices in the US, Canada, UK, Spain, Italy, France, Russia and Singapore and has distributors in more than 50 countries.
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“PineApp’s solution was completely “plug-and-play”, as it was
effective from the very beginning, and provided a very satisfactory Spam detection level.”
Paco Berta,
The Municipality of
Gerona
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IN A BRIEF
The Customer:
The Municipality of Gerona which serves about 94,000 people in the Catalan city.
The Challenge:
High rate of Spam detection, allowing peace of mind at controllable costs.
The Solution:
A Mail-SeCure 3021 unit was implemented. It provided complete annihilation of Spam and reduced the administrative workload.