2 page Case Study - Posted 11/5/2006
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Manufacturer Cuts Administration Time, Cost with “Strategic” E-Mail Security Solution
As paper manufacturer Koehler Paper Group upgrades to Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007, it plans to adopt Microsoft® Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server for e-mail security. Koehler calls the solution a “strategic” choice that will allow it to upgrade confidently and eliminate third-party security products—crucial given e-mail’s mission-critical importance to Koehler and the company’s small IT staff.
Business Needs
Koehler Paper Group turns out 440,000 tons of everything from thermal and carbonless papers to FineTech, ColorTech, décor, and specialty papers. Still, the company is as concerned with what’s not committed to paper as what is.
What’s not committed to paper, at Koehler, is a large and rapidly growing communications and collaboration infrastructure that includes e-mail, electronic facsimile, SMS messaging, and voicemail. The infrastructure supporting all of these is based on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003. Nor does Exchange Server work purely as a standalone solution; it’s integrated into Koehler’s business-critical SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning system. Every one of Koehler’s 1700 employees has an Exchange Server mailbox.
In an age when virus attacks on corporate technology systems are only growing, Koehler hasn’t experienced a successful virus attack in six years. It doesn’t attribute its good fortune to luck. It attributes it to Microsoft Antigen for Exchange Server—formerly Sybari Antigen for Exchange.
But as Koehler contemplated a move up to the 64-bit Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, it knew it would need to review its e-mail security options for the new platform. It wanted a product specifically designed to integrate with Exchange Server 2007. It wanted to eliminate the use of the third-party content scanning software that was part of its solution. It wanted a product that would provide even more functionality to protect against new types and sources of threats.
Solution
Koehler has that solution in a comprehensive security product for Exchange Server 2007 that is both new to the company and an old friend at the same time: Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server, the successor to the Microsoft Antigen solution it was already using, and one of a planned range of Microsoft Forefront products that will help protect ever-larger aspects of a company’s Microsoft-based infrastructure.
orefront Security for Exchange Server provides comprehensive protection against viruses, worms, and spam. The software works with a layered, multiple scan engine approach that helps stop the latest threats before they impact business and employees, while also maintaining uptime, optimizing performance, and simplifying the management of Exchange Server messaging systems.
Koehler is now evaluating a pre-release version of Forefront Security for Exchange Server in production use on a pre-release version of Exchange Server 2007 running on one of its mailbox servers. About 50 Koehler employees have mailboxes on this pilot system.
“Installing and using Forefront is simple,” says Alexander Fischer, Chief of IT Infrastructure, Koehler Paper Group. “If you already know Sybari, then you know how to install Forefront. If you don’t know Sybari, there are a couple of onscreen questions to answer. You can let the software do the rest.”
Forefront Security for Exchange Server gives Fischer and his colleagues the flexibility to run multiple antivirus scanning engines, with up to five running at any one time. As part of its pilot, the company is currently running the maximum number of concurrent engines and seeing no degradation in performance. The use of multiple, continually updated engines means that the software is more likely to catch the latest viruses.
Fischer also expects to take advantage of new features, such as protection against .exe, .zip, .mp3 and other files times that pose security or legal risks. He also expects to use features that optimize server availability and performance, such as the elimination of redundant scanning of a single piece of e-mail at several points in the system and the use of incremental background scanning to eliminate the need for multiple scans of the same mail stores.
Benefits
With Forefront Security for Exchange Server, Koehler is adopting what Fischer describes as a “strategic” choice for e-mail security for the company for years to come.
“We’re adopting Exchange Server 2007 so, from a strategic standpoint, it only makes sense to adopt Forefront Security for Exchange Server—the security solution built to integrate with Exchange Server 2007,” says Fischer. “We want to make sure all of our software works well together—with Exchange Server 2007 and Forefront Security for Exchange Server, we are sure that they will.”
Forefront Security for Exchange Server is a strategic choice for Koehler for reasons that go beyond integration. By adopting the solution, Koehler can consolidate its all of its e-mail security needs on a single solution, avoiding the licensing and maintenance costs of the third-party software it had been using for content filtering until now.
“If we can have all of our security needs addressed by a single software vendor—Microsoft—our strategic software provider, it’s obviously very efficient for us,” says Fischer.
Forefront Security for Exchange Server is also proving to be a good tactical choice for Koehler. With just two employees to administer the five-site e-mail infrastructure, there’s little time available for managing and troubleshooting an e-mail security solution. With the new solution, Fischer finds that’s just fine.
“Forefront Security for Exchange Server works like a dream,” says Fischer. “We don’t have to do anything to it until we’re ready to upgrade. With a small IT staff, that’s exactly what we want. Administering Forefront requires maybe one hour per month of our time. That’s nothing. It’s important to us that we can manage Forefront so efficiently.”
Part of that time savings comes from the solution’s automated console which, for example, Koehler allows to determine which scanning engines to run at any given time, freeing IT staff from having to monitor and choose the engines themselves. Incremental scanning of mail stores and the elimination of redundant scanning will ease bandwidth requirements.
And Koehler can monitor Forefront Security for Exchange Server, as well as future versions of Forefront for other Microsoft servers, with a single solution, Microsoft Operations Manager, further streamlining administration
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Document published October 2006
