2 page Case Study - Posted 2/1/2007
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Top Russian Manufacturer Cuts Downtime 20 to 30 Percent with Security Solution
SOK Group, one of Russia’s largest manufacturers, relied on a third-party product to protect its central e-mail infrastructure. But the single scan engine in that product sometimes allowed new viruses to slip through. So, as the company upgraded to Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007, it also migrated to Microsoft® Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server. As a result, it expects to cut downtime by 20 to 30 percent.
Business Needs
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We’ve seen the problems that come with just a single scan engine and we don’t want to see them anymore. Forefront Security for Exchange Server simply gives us a higher level of protection. Given the mission-critical nature of our e-mail system, that’s very important.  |
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Petr Grachev
Chief Information Officer
SOK Group |
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SOK Group has grown to be Russia’s largest automotive components producer and second-largest car producer. It generates more than U.S. $2.2 billion a year and employs more than 60,000 people.
Even more remarkably, it’s accomplished all that in a little more than 12 years. During this time, SOK took full advantage of advanced technologies and the growing capabilities of internet communications to support its business with applications that help it quickly respond to market demands.
“E-mail is mission critical to us,” says Dmitry Rumyantsev, Manager of the SOK Public Relations Department. “SOK Group is made up of enterprises of different businesses in many regions of Russia. We control 40 companies throughout the country. E-mail is our primary means of managing business reporting and planning, and coordinating the activities of all these companies.”
To enable that e-mail messaging, SOK Group relies on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003. The company’s central e-mail infrastructure consists of six Exchange Server computers, two in a front-end cluster, two in a mailbox cluster, and two edge servers. The Exchange Server system receives some 200 million e-mail messages per month—approximately 60 to 70 percent of which is spam.
To protect its e-mail system from virus infection, SOK Group has relied on a third-party antivirus product. While the software has generally been reliable, according to Petr Grachev, Chief Information Officer at SOK, there have also been incidents in which new viruses hit the network before the vendor issued the necessary signature updates. Relying on the single antivirus engine in that software has resulted in a hit on e-mail availability, which has hovered around 90 percent.
To better meet the increasing demands it puts on e-mail, SOK Group is migrating to Microsoft Exchange Server 2007. The migration gave SOK the opportunity to reconsider its choice for e-mail security.
Solution
SOK Group is planning to move to 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. It ships with and integrates multiple industry-leading antivirus engines to provide comprehensive, layered protection against the latest threats.
SOK Group tested Forefront Security for Exchange Server in a proof-of-concept over a period of three months on three of its e-mail servers: an edge server, a hub server, and a mailbox server. The test enabled Forefront Security for Exchange Server to be exposed to all e-mail traffic coming from the Internet and to protect first 100 and then 200 of the central office’s 700 e-mailboxes. With the test completed successfully, SOK Group expanded the deployment to the entire infrastructure.
One of the key features tested by SOK Group was the ability of Forefront Security for Exchange Server to run five scan engines simultaneously. SOK Group also tested the ability of Forefront Security for Exchange Server to filter and block potentially dangerous file attachments, such as .exe files, as well as its ability to files regardless of the file extension.
“It’s important that Forefront Security for Exchange Server can block selected files because the biggest dangers can be disguised behind innocuous file extensions,” says Grachev.
The company has also begun to use the software’s ability to tag scanned files, eliminating the need to rescan them as they move throughout the system.
Benefits
By moving to Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server, SOK Group expects to cut the downtime of its e-mail infrastructure by 20 to 30 percent. This improvement will come primarily from the ability to use five scan engines simultaneously in Forefront Security for Exchange Server, compared to the single scan engine in its previous security product.
“With the multiple simultaneous scan engines in Forefront Security for Exchange Server, we did not have a single virus infection,” says Grachev. “We’ve seen the problems that come with just a single scan engine and we don’t want to see them any more. Forefront Security for Exchange Server simply gives us a higher level of protection. Given the mission-critical nature of our e-mail system, that’s very important.”
Grachev also likes the easier and more cost-effective management of e-mail security that they expect to gain with Forefront Security for Exchange Server.
“The administrator console is great—easy to use,” he says. “And we are very excited about the management pack for Forefront Security for Exchange Server, which will enable us to monitor the solution using the same Microsoft Operations Manager software that we already use in our environment.
Having e-mail security delivered from Microsoft also helps simplify the overall management of the e-mail infrastructure, according to Grachev. “Given the importance of e-mail to our company, we can’t afford to have the finger pointing that comes when multiple vendors each say the other is the source of a problem,” he says. “With our e-mail and e-mail security software from a single source—Microsoft—management and troubleshooting will be streamlined. If there is a problem, we’ll get the system up and running again sooner. That will contribute to greater uptime as well.”
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Document published February 2007
