TOPNORDIC

IT Provider Chooses E-mail Security Solution for Performance, Reliability, Low TCO

TOPNORDIC, one of Europe’s leading technology solution providers, designs and hosts e-mail solutions for its corporate and government customers. These solutions must provide top performance and reliability, both to satisfy customers and to keep costs low. As customers adopt Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007, TOPNORDIC recommends Microsoft® Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server over third-party alternatives.

Business Needs

TOPNORDIC is Europe’s third-largest hardware provider and the largest provider of IT solutions throughout Scandinavia. More than 1,000 companies throughout Europe have acquired TOPNORDIC solutions. The company, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, serves as an application services provider (ASP) to provide hosted solutions for more than 60 companies.

We really believe in Forefront Security for Exchange Server. We’re known for providing great security to our customers and we believe that this product provides the best protection at the best price. We see it becoming the market leader for e-mail security.  Haythum Auda Infrastructure Architect TOPNORDIC

In its role as an ASP, TOPNORDIC maintains 42 computer servers and about 6,500 e-mailboxes on Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 communications and collaboration software. That’s in addition to TOPNORDIC’s own corporate Exchange Server 2003 installation, serving its 3,300 employees. While virtually every company that runs an e-mail system is concerned about security, TOPNORDIC has an added concern: it has to keep the e-mail servers it runs for clients free of viruses and spam because its own business and reputation depend on it.

To maintain security on its e-mail servers, TOPNORDIC has depended on third-party antivirus software. While that software has mostly performed as needed, it hasn’t been without cost. Some antivirus scanning products consume unacceptable levels of server overhead. That overhead can result in a noticeable reduction in server performance, according to according to Haythum Auda, Infrastructure Architect at TOPNORDIC. To counter that degradation, TOPNORDIC has sometimes had to reduce the number of e-mailboxes it runs per server, lowering efficiency and increasing cost.

Even when performance isn’t an issue, training staff on additional software products—and then maintaining that trained staff—becomes an additional expense that TOPNORDIC must absorb or pass along to its customers.

Both TOPNORDIC and some of its customers are now preparing to upgrade to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007, the newest version of Microsoft’s e-mail software. That move gives TOPNORDIC reason to reconsider the software that it uses and recommends for e-mail security.

Solution

TOPNORDIC has done just that. In addition to preparing to deploy Exchange Server 2007, it has been testing—and plans to deploy—Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server, the successor to Microsoft Antigen for Exchange Server and one of a planned range of Microsoft Forefront products that will protect ever-larger aspects of a company’s Microsoft-based infrastructure.

Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server includes multiple scan engines from industry-leading security firms integrated in a single solution to help businesses protect their Exchange messaging environments from viruses, worms, and spam. By integrating and shipping with multiple industry-leading antivirus engines, Forefront Security for Exchange Server provides comprehensive, layered protection against the latest threats.

TOPNORDIC is currently testing a prerelease version of Forefront Security for Exchange Server together with a prerelease version of Exchange Sever 2007 in several hosted client environments.   One of those environments, for example, includes two clustered mailbox server computers, with all e-mail traffic passing through an edge server running Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server 2006.

In this environment, Auda and his colleagues are testing the solution’s ability to run five antivirus engines simultaneously. For another client, with 2,700 e-mailboxes that is migrating from Notes to Exchange Server 2007, TOPNORDIC is also testing the antispam capabilities of Forefront Security for Exchange Server and Exchange 2007 Server.

Auda and his colleagues are exploiting a variety of features in Forefront Security for Exchange Server, including the ability to filter out potentially dangerous file-type attachments (such as .exe and .zip files) and to filter out content based on keywords. TOPNORDIC has these filters configured differently for each customer, based on the customer’s needs and preferences.

Benefits

TOPNORDIC, the largest provider of third-party antivirus products in its market, intends to make Forefront Security for Exchange Server available to all of its customers.

“We really believe in Forefront Security for Exchange Server,” says Auda. “We’re known for providing great security to our customers and we believe that this product provides the best protection at the best price. We see it becoming the market leader for e-mail security.”

Auda supports that praise, in part, by citing the product’s multiple scanning engines. “There’s no other multiple scanning engine offering as good as what ships with Forefront Security for Exchange Server,” he says. “It allows us to catch more viruses than we could with another product and that means more uptime for our customers. And unlike scanning products that degrade server performance, we’ve seen no issues with Forefront Security for Exchange Server. It just doesn’t give us any headaches. We also like that it doesn’t degrade our server performance.”

Because the protection against dangerous file types and spam is so easy to configure and allows TOPNORDIC to set parameters differently for different servers, it’s ideal for a complex environment, such as the ASP hosting environment of TOPNORDIC, according to Auda.

“We like that Forefront Security for Exchange Server is highly efficient with a very light footprint,” says Auda. “When I recommend an architecture solution, I want to meet all of my customer’s needs with as few components as possible. Fewer components mean lower cost, less maintenance, less need for trained staff. Forefront Security for Exchange Server means I don’t need to include several other antivirus and antispam products. And because we can manage it with the same Microsoft Operations Manager interface we already use to manage Microsoft environments, we can ensure higher performance while keeping costs even lower.”

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/resources/casestudies

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published December 2006