Washington State University (WSU) announced that it had deployed the SaaS (News - Alert) e-mail security solution, Proofpoint on Demand, to fight against e-mail spam. Proofpoint is a provider of unified e-mail security, archiving and data prevention solutions.
E-mail spam and security continues to be a problem area for many – including large corporations, businesses and educational institutions. According to research conducted by IT security and control firm, Sophos, by June 2008, the level of spam rose to include 96.5 percent of all business e-mail. This number is up from the 92.3 percent revealed in the first three months of the year, with corporations finding that only one in 28 e-mails is legitimate.
According to the report, United States is the top offender in a list of 12 countries identified for relaying spam across the world.
WSU is a nationally recognized research university with more than 24,000 students and it manages more than 20 e-mail domains, serving approximately 30,000 e-mail users. With an increase in the student population over the years, the university’s email traffic and spam volumes has increased substantially.
The university's previous e-mail security solution was not able to deliver and required a large amount of intervention by the WSU’s IT staff.
Faced with an urgent need to improve the performance of its e-mail infrastructure, WSU decided on Proofpoint (News - Alert), based on the company's reputation for delivering comprehensive e-mail security solutions with outstanding anti-spam accuracy and high performance. A few months earlier, Proofpoint had been deployed at Butler University.
"We required a bulletproof solution that could scale easily to handle our increasing email volume and that automatically adapts to constantly changing email threats," said Tom Ambrosi, senior director of networks and chief information security officer for WSU.
The Proofpoint appliance delivered near-perfect accuracy against spam and featured administration and end-user options like personalized easy-to-use e-mail and Web-based quarantines. After the evaluation phase, WSU deployed Proofpoint in order to protect the university's entire e-mail infrastructure.
The new spam solution has impressed many users and WSU’s IT department. The Proofpoint on Demand solution is able to catch over half a million spam messages per day, blocking them before they reach WSU's various downstream mail servers.
"Proofpoint gives customers the flexibility of deploying 'in the cloud' like WSU, on-premises or using a hybrid approach," said Gary Steele, CEO of Proofpoint and Washington State University alumnus.
As the holiday season approaches at least the staff and students of WSU have one less battle to fight – that with spam.
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Anita B (News - Alert). is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Anita's articles, please visit her columnist page.
Edited by Michelle Robart
