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Case StudySpam Killed by BarracudaThe Salvation Army, with 35,000 Lotus Notes users around the world, has slashed the cost of spam and virus filtering by moving to a Barracuda Networks appliance from Computer Communications Limited (CCL). The Salvation Army, with its HQ in London, is one of those organisations that surprises you the moment you learn about it. For example, it employs almost 110,000 employees around the globe and has an income of some £27.5 million. The 2004 Yearbook yields surprises on the scale of the operation - there are thousands of Salvation Army-run hostels, lodges, homes, training centres, refuges, playgroups and drop-in centres around the world, helping millions of people.
Visit the Salvation Army's international IT centre in Lovatt Lane, London, and there are more surprises - its offices are in the same building as The Reliance Bank, a wholly owned subsidiary, providing finance for corporate and private customers.
The IT department is a busy place, providing strategic direction and policies to over 100 countries, and acting as the central e-mail gateway for the 35,000 users of its Lotus Notes system.
Content control is critical to the organisation. More than most, the Salvation Army needs to protect its users from inappropriate and offensive content, as over a quarter of its employees are ordained ministers of the Church.
The London IT centre hosts the systems that handle all inbound email for Salvation Army users worldwide. Until recently they used Superscout from Surfcontrol, but they found that costs were beginning to rocket.
"We were comfortable with the product but found that continuous software and hardware updates were taking their toll on our budget," commented Mark Calleran, Head of IT, Worldwide. "The design seemed to be very resource hungry and we realised in early 2004 that the system couldn't cope with demand and that another upgrade was inevitable, so we looked for alternatives."
At a technical meeting in Canada, Calleran was demonstrated a dedicated spam filtering appliance from Barracuda Networks, and was immediately impressed. Not only was the hardware highly efficient, but the pricing structure meant the Barracuda solution would actually cost less in total than the annual maintenance cost of the current system and therefore pay for itself within the first year.
"I couldn't believe that the little blue Barracuda Spam Firewall could handle so much traffic, so I got on the web to find a UK reseller while I was still in Canada." Calleran quickly found CCL, based in Romsey, Hampshire, on Google and emailed them right away to request a demonstration. A meeting was set up for the day he returned to the UK.
"Sure enough, a blue box arrived the morning I returned to the office, and within the hour I was talking to Dennis Armstrong, the Sales Director from CCL, in my office. We agreed to trial a Barracuda unit and really haven't looked back."
The Barracuda box is a dedicated SMTP e-mail filter, and very easy to deploy - Calleran reckons it only took five minutes to slot the hardware into the system rack and to configure on the primary domain. "To be honest the most time-consuming task was setting it up for the 54 sub-domains we operate, and that only took 30 minutes."
Designed by a team of experienced networking engineers, the Barracuda Spam Firewall is innovative in its hardware and software design, incorporating reliability and resilience and priced for the small business as well as the large ISP, supporting up to 25,000,000 e-mails a day with huge capacity and RAID included in the high end models.
Its architecture leverages open source spam and virus solutions in conjunction with ten defense layers: denial of service and security protection, IP block list, rate control, virus check with archive decompression, proprietary virus check, user specified rules, spam fingerprint check, intention analysis, spam rule-based scoring, and Bayesian analysis.
The Energize Update subscription service automatically updates the Barracuda Spam Firewall with the latest spam rules and virus definitions.
In addition, users have a part to play in spam prevention. Should any spam slip through the net, users can tag it as spam. This provides enough information for the Barracuda appliance to either tag (as a warning) or block further emails to other users. Tagged and blocked emails are quarantined but can still be viewed by the users if they wish - a simple web browser connection to the appliance allows users to check their dubious messages.
"Within a week we'd seen enough and ordered two more boxes - one to share the load and one for redundancy."
A month into live operation, the systems continue to do their job and are all but forgotten at the bottom of the server cabinet. The quick stats facility reveals that almost 75 per cent of emails during the first month were either blocked or tagged - "which is a staggering volume of rubbish which before we implemented Barracuda was clogging up our e-mail servers."
The database continues to learn from users' spam rejections and yet allows legitimate email through. The database, which is maintained within the Barracuda appliance, accounts for less than five per cent of storage, ensuring many years before an upgrade will be required.
"The experience and service has been excellent," concluded Calleran. "CCL has been very responsive. The product is incredibly powerful and yet simple. We have slashed the cost of Spam and virus filtering, which is very important to us as a charity, and I have not had a single false positive report, so everybody is happy."
Further information can be obtained by visiting www.ccl.co.uk/barracuda.html or by calling CCL on 0844 873 2668
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