2 page Case Study - Posted 11/28/2006

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Pei Cobb Freed

Leading Architectural Firm Picks E-mail Security Solution for Performance, Easy Use

E-mail is mission-critical to Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, one of the world’s premier architectural design firms. To help keep e-mail running, the company plans to move to Microsoft® Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server as it upgrades to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. It likes the greater antivirus protection it gets from five simultaneously scanning engines—compared to the one engine it had with its previous antivirus solution.

Business Needs

The John F. Kennedy Library and the John Hancock Tower in Boston; the Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong; the expansion and modernization of the Louvre museum in Paris; the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C.

What these buildings and some 200 more have in common is their origin: the architectural firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners (formerly I. M. Pei & Partners), one of the leading architectural design firms in the world. And while the results of Pei Cobb Freed’s work could not be more physical, producing those iconic structures depends on something decidedly non-physical: e-mail.

“Nearly all of our business transactions are done by email,” says George Podolak, Director of IT at Pei Cobb Freed. “If our e-mail were to go down for more than four hours, it would wreck havoc on our business. If our e-mail system were to go down for more than a day, it would be catastrophic.”

That e-mail system runs on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003. An e-mail server at the company’s headquarters serves some 200 employees. When employees go out into the field, they stay connected to e-mail with Microsoft Office Outlook® Web Access messaging and collaboration client or a virtual private network connection to their desktop and resources.

To protect its e-mail system, Pei Cobb Freed has relied on third-party antivirus software. The company is now testing a prerelease version of Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, which Podolak says he likes especially because of the enhanced functionality in the new version of Outlook Web Access. The company plans to deploy Exchange Server 2007—and that decision gave the company the opportunity to reconsider its antivirus options as well, and to look for the best security solution for its new e-mail software.

Solution

To meet its new e-mail security needs, Pei Cobb Freed has also been testing a prerelease version of Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server, the successor to Microsoft Antigen for Exchange Server and one of a planned range of Microsoft Forefront products to protect ever-larger aspects of a company’s Microsoft-based infrastructure.

Our users expect e-mail to always work and Forefront Security for Exchange Server is one tool that we use to make that happen.  George Podolak Director of IT Pei Cobb Freed & Partners

Pei Cobb Freed is testing Forefront Security for Exchange Server on an Exchange Server 2007 e-mail server running on a Dell PowerEdge 2850 dual-core/dual-processor computer. In this test environment, it serves about 10 percent of the company’s e-mail users; after deployment, the single e-mail server will serve the company’s entire e-mail population.

Podolak has been testing Forefront Security for Exchange Server ability to run five antivirus engines simultaneously, helping ensure that the company has the most up-to-date antivirus protection possible. Forefront Security for Exchange Server includes industry-leading antivirus engines from global security firms such as Kaspersky Labs, CA, and Sophos. A built-in multiple-engine manager helps ensure that if one engine fails or goes offline to update, the other engines continue to scan the messaging environment.

Podolak has also been testing other features of the software, such as content filtering and file-type filtering. Content filtering allows Pei Cobb Freed to block e-mails that may have inappropriate language, helping to avoid liability problems. File-type filtering allows the company to block potentially dangerous file-type attachments, such as .exe and .bat files. Because of the highly visual nature of its business, Pei Cobb Freed needs many other file-type attachments, such as .wav and .jpg files, to go through unimpeded. The solution enables Podolak to set file-type filtering accordingly.

Benefits

“Our users expect email to always work and Forefront Security for Exchange Server is one tool that we use to make that happen,” says Podolak.”

Podolak says he’s equally impressed with the software’s performance and the ease with which it enables him to manage his e-mail security.

“What impressed me right away about Forefront Security for Exchange Server was its support for five simultaneously scanning antivirus engines,” Podolak says. “Wow—that’s really cool. The antivirus product we’d been using before had one engine. With Forefront Security for Exchange Server, we have five shots at being up to date against new threats, not just one. This is clearly the more effective solution.”  Forefront Security for Exchange Server doesn’t just do content and file-type filtering—it makes those features easier to configure and use than Podolak expected. For example, he says he likes the ease with which Forefront Security for Exchange Server allows him to configure file filtering to suit the company’s needs—allowing some file types to go through while blocking those that pose greater threats, now or in the future.

“Forefront Security for Exchange Server also made it easier for me to see the direct results of file filtering,” says Podolak. “I could see which e-mails and files were filtered and tagged. It was simply quicker and easier to use than our previous solution. That’s also true for the way it handles content filtering. I really appreciate that it’s so easy to use. Our previous software made content filtering painful.”

Podolak says he also appreciates solution features—such as incremental background scanning and the elimination of redundant scanning—that help provide security while reducing the overhead on his infrastructure. With an automatic, incremental scan of newer files, the company can implement scans efficiently, saving the hours it takes for a manual scan while also spotting problems more quickly. By tagging a message after it’s scanned, Forefront Security for Exchange Server reduces the need to rescan the message as it moves through the infrastructure.

“Forefront Security for Exchange Server adds efficiency to the overall scanning process,” says Podolak. “It takes fewer CPU cycles and provides more protection than we had before. I like that.”

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Document published November 2006