Logan City Council is located in Queensland, between Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Council has more than 850 employees and its major customers are the ratepayers and local businesses within the Logan City area.
Logan was created as a Shire in 1978 and then a City in July 1979. In 20 years the population has grown from about 69,000 people to 170,000. Today, Logan is a bustling, diverse city, with a youthful population where more than 50 per cent of residents are under 30 years of age.
The growth of the internet in the late 1990s made Logan City Council realise it needed protection against viruses and unsolicited emails entering and circulating around the IT network. In 1997, Council decided to purchase CS MAILsweeper and CS WEBsweeper, part of Clearswift’s MIMEsweeper suite of solutions. According to Michael Fanning, Logan City Council’s Systems Specialist, no other competitive products were considered at the time of purchase, as not many others offered this type of email filtering software.
Four years later in 2001, a review of Council’s security needs established that MIMEsweeper was still the best option and they immediately upgraded to version 4.2.
“With Clearswift MIMEsweeper, we have reduced the amount of bandwidth used between the Council and our ISP. This means more users have access to these resources,” Michael Fanning said. “Clearswift MIMEsweeper together with a leading anti-virus solution, has prevented enormous disruption to our network from viruses and hackers. Since the first implementation, Logan City Council’s internal network has not been hit with a single virus. No loss of productivity and enormous cost savings all round.
“Probably the greatest benefit of the implementation is that the Council has stopped all web traffic to graphic and inappropriate web sites. Clearswift’s MAILsweeper and WEBsweeper products have greatly reduced the non-business-related emails and web traffic to, from and within Logan City Council.”
Logan City Council’s main technical considerations were that the product would fulfil the following.
- Fit into Council’s environment and run on its existing O/S platforms.
- Handle future upgrades to the O/S.
- Run in the DMZ to give the Council protection from infection or malicious attacks.
- Integrate with Council’s current mail and proxy servers.
Michael Fanning said that MIMEsweeper was retained because of the wide range of tasks each product performed, the positive reviews received from other customers and the fact that other products the Council looked at ‘didn’t cut the mustard’.
Logan City bought 750 licenses for MAILsweeper and WEBsweeper. Both products are set up to scan for viruses, Council’s main priority for IT security. Clearswift’s MAILsweeper blocks the transfer of video, music, executables, binary files and inbound emails from known malicious sources. It checks for inappropriate text and is used to delay the transfer of large, outbound email until after hours.
Clearswift’s WEBsweeper uses the PICS and RASCI settings to block access to inappropriate web sites, scan for inappropriate text and prevent the download of music files.
A crucial element of the implementation was establishing a formal security policy for Council employees, outlining the rules of internet and email communication. Before being granted access, all staff must read and sign a management directive on internet and email use.
Council’s mail server is Exchange 5.5 on Win NT4 SP6, which resides on a Dell Poweredge 6450 with Quad PIII 700 Xeon processors and 1GB of RAM. The internal network is a windows NT4 domain running TCP/IP. The exchange server connects to the MAILsweeper server (located in the DMZ) via the firewall. Council’s MAILsweeper server is also a NT4 server on a dual PII 550 Compaq with 512MB RAM.
The proxy server (Microsoft ISA Server) also resides on the internal network and is a W2K O/S on a Dell Poweredge 2550 with single P4 1.1GB CPU and 1GB of RAM. This connects to Council’s WEBsweeper server (also located in the DMZ) via the firewall. The WEBsweeper server is a Dell Poweredge 1550 with dual PIII 1GB CPU with 1GB of RAM running WIN NT4.
For further information about Clearswift, please call 1300 364 144 or go to www.clearswift.com
* Copy supplied by Clearswift
