With 500 email users and 90,000 incoming and outgoing emails every month, it is crucial that Tweed Shire Council in northern New South Wales has an effective network, with high quality filters and spam detection.
In 2007, Council identified that staff were becoming increasingly frustrated with the amount of spam coming through, and delays in message transmission were affecting productivity.
At the time, spam accounted for more than half the total email volume and as well as consuming valuable bandwidth, it was a burden on council’s IT managers who were often required to release emails incorrectly identified as spam (false positives).
Serving businesses and a community spread across more than 1,300 square kilometres, Council’s Systems Supervisor Technology and Corporate Services Christopher Peate said that electronic communications are critical to every Tweed business unit.
“As in any business, email is used to manage most inbound and outbound customer communications,” he said.
“The failure to correctly control the influx of spam and malware hidden in junk emails and on suspect websites had direct cost implications for Council, including bandwidth wastage, administrative overheads and the impact on end user productivity.”
In the past, Council had relied on server based inhouse anti spam software.
Although the software was quarantining some of the spam, it could only do this after all spam was downloaded onto the corporate network.
“We were wasting about three hours a week managing false positives, and our valuable bandwidth was being consumed by large amounts of spam, a waste which was very costly to Council,” Christopher Peate said.
“The previous inhouse software also allowed end users some control over spam management, which meant that some spam was still being distributed internally and there was a disruption to productivity.”
Tweed was also vulnerable to viruses, and prior to implementation of its new system, had an outbreak of the Sasser Worm, which affected 13 machines and took a week to clean up.
With these issues in mind, Council moved to the MessageLabs suite from Symantec.cloudô. This ensures that all spam, malware infected emails and suspect web pages are stopped in the cloud (the internet layer), before they reach the network.
Christopher Peate said that to date, the software has successfully blocked 79.9 per cent of spam and complaints from staff have ceased.
“Emails are virus free and staff are no longer afraid to open their mail for fear of launching a virus,” he said.
“Web filtering also allows us to monitor internet usage and automatically enforce Council’s Acceptable Use Policy – further controlling bandwidth wastage by limiting multimedia streaming to a small group of users whose job requires it.”
As well as slashing bandwidth costs and improving security and productivity, the MessageLabs services have relieved the administrative burden on Council’s IT team.
“With a negligible false positive rate, the IT team no longer needs to manually filter or release incorrectly blocked mail, and there is no internal software or hardware requiring costly management and maintenance,” Christopher Peate said.
“Internal IT support staff also have the ability to make changes as required, like allowing someone access to Facebook.
“We previously had no user based authentication, so these maintenance tasks couldn’t be delegated to our IT support team. They had no rights to access the server, which is where we had to make the configuration changes.
“The MessageLabs services are extremely easy to configure, obtain reports from and manage, and the predictable cost structure is a huge plus for the Council.”
Tweed Shire Council is currently looking to increase services accessible through its website, such as submission of development applications, and is enhancing the integration of email and the website for the transfer of data.
For further information contact Christopher Peate on (02) 6670 2400.
