Case Study: Harrisonburg Public Schools

Located in the heart of Virginia's scenic Shenandoah Valley, Harrisonburg City Public Schools has approximately 750 staff and 4,400 students spread across six different schools and one technical center.

Like most organizations today, Harrisonburg City Public Schools has become increasingly reliant on email. Unfortunately, Harrisonburg discovered that dealing with spam was becoming more and more time consuming job. "We have roughly 1,050 email accounts for our staff and students," said Dwayne Hottinger Harrisonburg's Network Administrator. "Each of those accounts was being hit by about 100 emails a day."

Harrisonburg had an anti-spam solution in place but, while it blocked a large proportion of the incoming spam, an unacceptably high volume of non-spam (ham) emails were also blocked. To make matters worse, the solution did not provide an easy and speedy mechanism for users to access the misidentified messages; instead, IT had to hunt for them. "We were running an open source spam filter called Bogofilter," recalls Hottinger. "The product generally worked well, but searching for the emails that had been wrongly quarantined was taking up way too much of my time."

Harrisonburg decided that the time had come to look for an alternative solution, for which Hottinger identified three key requirements:

• Comprehensive protection from spam and other email-borne threats;
• Responsibility for spam management needed to be shifted from IT to end-users;
• The Easy deployment and easy management.

"I looked at a number of options, including a Barracuda appliance, but decided that SpamTitan was the best fit for our profile," said Hottinger. "The product promised accurate detection, end-user spam controls and didn't require any high-end hardware. SpamTitan was also considerably cheaper than any of the other products I looked at."

Harrisonburg installed SpamTitan in early 2007. According to Hottinger, "Setup was extremely easy. I downloaded SpamTitan ISO and had SpamTitan up and running in under 30 minutes. No configuration or tuning was necessary; it worked right out of the box."

COMPREHENSIVE PROTECTION; LESS WORK FOR IT

SpamTitan is a turn-key email security solution which has been designed to be easily managed by organizations of all size, even those with extremely limited in-house technical resources. Some anti-spam solutions do not provide end-users with a mechanism to access quarantined items, and that means that the responsibility for finding misidentified messages rests with IT and finding those messages can be an extremely onerous task. SpamTitan, however, provides end-users with complete control over their own spam. A digest of quarantined emails is delivered to end-users and, using the links in the digest, users can specify whether an email is to be delivered, deleted or its sender whitelisted.

"SpamTitan enabled me to put spam management in hands of staff and students, and that alone has saved me a significant amount of time," said Hottinger. "The feedback I have had from both faculty and staff has been very positive. They like seeing the emails that have been marked as spam and being able to choose to deliver or delete them."

SpamTitan also has only a minimal management overhead. Hottinger says that managing SpamTitan takes under 30 minutes a week. "SpamTitan is extremely easy to manage. It's auto-updating and needs no tuning at all. I did an upgrade last week, and even that took less than 15 minutes. Everything seems to be well researched and tested prior to being released."

Harrisonburg had been concerned about the impact of spam on the network, but they had been even more concerned about its impact on their staff and, more importantly, their students."Spam often contains inappropriate or offensive subject matter and we needed to protect our students from that," said Hottinger. "SpamTitan has done an excellent job of ensuring that such material doesn't find its way into their inboxes."

SPAMTITAN BENEFITS

Enterprise-class security. SpamTitan uses a range of technologies, including OCR, to ensure that 99% of spam is canned before it reaches the mail server. Industry-leading anti-virus engines from ClamAV and Kaspersky Lab ensure complete protection from viruses and other email-borne threats.

Rapid deployment and easy management. SpamTitan can be installed and configured in under 30 minutes and provides end-users with complete control over their spam, reducing IT's workload and reducing the chance of messages being misidentified. SpamTitan is completely auto-updating and is able to block emerging threats with zero tuning.

Low cost. SpamTitan is significantly less expensive than competing solutions, brining enterprise-class security within easy reach of the smaller business.

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