4-page Case Study - Posted 3/5/2007
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Major European Airport Maintains Operational Efficiency—Security Solution Makes it Easy
E-mail is a mission-critical technology for Vienna International Airport, one of Europe’s busiest. To keep the e-mail flying smoothly despite increasing threats from viruses and spam, the airport is deploying Microsoft® Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server throughout the enterprise. The airport expects the same high level of protection and simplified management that it’s had from the predecessor product to Forefront Security—Microsoft Antigen.
Situation
Vienna International Airport is among the busiest in Europe. Last year it handled a total of 16,855,725 passengers with a minimum connecting time of 25 minutes on 237,490 take-offs and landings. Its operational efficiency is a must.
The airport maintains its efficiency in part the way any large enterprise does: through e-mail. Vienna International Airport relied on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 to manage a flow of 100,000 e-mail messages per day, where about 11,500 messages are flight relevant status messages. About 70,000 e-mails are spam. The airport’s Exchange Server infrastructure consists of eight servers, including two edge servers, two unified messaging servers, two client access servers, and two mailbox storage servers in an active/passive cluster.
To combat the types of viruses and spam that affect virtually every enterprise communications infrastructure, Vienna International Airport has depended on Microsoft Antigen for Exchange Server. The airport first deployed Antigen seven years ago and the product has enabled it to filter out 92 percent of all spam and 100 percent of all viruses—the e-mail infrastructure hasn’t been hit by a virus since deploying Antigen. Overall uptime has hovered above 99 percent.
As the airport upgrades its environment to the 64-bit Exchange Server 2007, it has the opportunity to adopt a 64-bit security solution, as well.
Solution
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Forefront Security for Exchange Server can be part of a much broader security and management infrastructure. That’s important as we look for new ways to increase our operational efficiency. |
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Astrid Christ-Weiss
Project Manager, IT-Solutions
Vienna International Airport |
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Vienna International Airport is maintaining its high levels of antivirus and anti-spam protection, thanks to its new security solution: Microsoft Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server, the successor to the Antigen product it was already using, and one of a range of Microsoft Forefront products that will help protect ever-larger aspects of a company’s Microsoft-based infrastructure. After a successful evaluation and pilot, the airport is rolling out Forefront Security for Exchange Server to its 800 mailboxes throughout the enterprise.
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.
After a successful pilot, the airport installed the solution on all of its Exchange Server servers. It uses as many as five scanning engines per server. Forefront Security for Exchange Server helped the airport through its migration to Exchange Server 2007 because the solution includes Antigen for Exchange for Exchange Server 2003 and Exchange 2000 Server, providing consistent protection across older Exchange Server servers and Exchange Server 2007 servers.
The airport is using file-type filtering in Forefront Security for Exchange Server to block e-mail messages with potentially dangerous attachments, such as .exe, .zip, .bat, .cmd, .hlp, .js, and jse files. It is also using keyword filtering to block e-mail messages that don’t conform to airport policy or that may constitute spam.
Also important to the airport is Forefront Security for Exchange Server’s elimination of redundant scanning, which helps provide security while reducing the overhead on the infrastructure. By tagging a message after it’s scanned, Forefront Security for Exchange Server eliminates the need to rescan the message as it moves through the infrastructure. This reduces the network bandwidth needed for antivirus protection.
Benefits
“We wanted a security solution with the same quality as Microsoft Antigen—that’s what we get with Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server, and more,” says Herbert Dopita, Information & Communications Systems Administrator Vienna International Airport.
“E-mail is mission-critical as a way for our employees to communicate,” says Astrid Christ-Weiss, Project Manager, IT-Solutions, Vienna International Airport. “It keeps the airport running. And Forefront Security for Exchange Server will keep our e-mail running.”
Dopita praises Forefront Security for Exchange Server’s five simultaneous antivirus scanning engines, which will enable the airport to increase the number of scanning engines it uses per server.
“No single antivirus engine can provide complete protection,” says Dopita. “So, the more engines we deploy from different vendors, the greater our chances of detecting the newest viruses.”
Similarly, the powerful anti-spam features of Forefront Security for Exchange Server, when used in conjunction with Exchange Server 2007, give the airport an even more potent defense against spam.
“Spam is a growing problem for every enterprise e-mail system,” says Christ-Weiss. “To ensure we’re protected, we have to raise our defenses. Forefront Security for Exchange Server provides that increased defense.”
Dopita says he’s especially impressed with the integration features of Forefront Security for Exchange Server. “This is the most integrated security product for Exchange Server,” says Dopita. “Which means that it’s one of the easiest products we can deploy, configure, and maintain for Exchange Server. It is at least as easy to use as the Antigen product with which we’re already familiar.”
The integration benefits of Forefront Security go beyond its integration with Exchange Server. Dopita, Christ-Weiss, and their colleagues contemplate expanding their Forefront Security deployment to include protection of their Microsoft Office SharePoint Portal Server 2003 portal, and then to manage both security deployments with a single Forefront security console.
“Forefront Security for Exchange Server can be part of a much broader security and management infrastructure,” says Christ-Weiss. “That’s important as we look for new ways to increase our operational efficiency.”
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about the Vienna International Airport visit the Web site at:
www.viennaairport.com
Microsoft Forefront
For more information about the Microsoft Forefront security products, go to
www.microsoft.com/forefront
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published February 2007
