4-page Case Study - Posted 8/17/2007

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Trinity College Dublin

University Limits Spam, Reduces IT Costs with E-Mail Filtering Service

Ireland’s oldest and most famous university, Trinity College Dublin, was fighting a growing spam problem. Each day, university staff and students received dozens of unsolicited e-mail messages, forcing them to spend the first half-hour of their day deleting unwanted, and sometimes offensive, messages. Of the 20 million messages sent and received each month, 80 percent were spam, overloading the university’s servers, tying up IT staff, and delaying the receipt of legitimate e-mail by up to two to three hours. To confront this problem, Trinity deployed Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Services, a hosted solution for spam filtering. The solution has greatly cut back the number of unsolicited e-mail messages, dramatically increasing staff and student productivity. It has also cut IT costs by about €20,000 (U.S.$27,618) a year, freeing up staff to work on other important university projects.

Situation

Exchange Hosted Services represents great value for the money. It could end up being one of the best investments we’ve ever made.  John Murphy Deputy Director of IS Services Trinity College Dublin

Like many academic institutions around the world, Trinity had become a large target for spammers. Faculty and staff were particularly vulnerable to attack, since most have their e-mail addresses posted on the university Web site and elsewhere online. Compounding the problem was the fact that faculty specializing in specific subject areas such as music, psychology, or medicine were being deluged with unwanted advertising specific to their specialty areas.

To address its spam problem, Trinity was using a Unix-based e-mail system with a rules-based spam filter. The IT department regularly updated its spam filter from a central location, but this proved to be a cumbersome, hit-or-miss process. No sooner would IT staff complete an upgrade than a new type of spam would emerge, making its way past the rules-based filter. Although individual users could fine-tune the system, this, too, was a no-win situation. “You could set the filter at a very high level and get a lot of false positives, or you set it at a low level and have everything coming into your in-box,” says John Murphy, Deputy Director of IS Services at Trinity. “No matter what you did, it was quite messy.”

At the height of the problem, 80 percent of the 20 million e-mails Trinity processed each month were spam. Students and staff were being bombarded with up to 70 unsolicited messages a day, forcing them to spend the first 20 to 30 minutes of their mornings deleting unwanted, and sometimes offensive, e-mail. “It’s not a very nice way to start the day having to sort through your inbox to decide what’s a valid versus invalid e-mail message,” Murphy says. “To make matters worse, some of the e-mails had pornographic images or links to pornographic sites, which people found offensive.”

As the university’s four overloaded e-mail servers struggled to process the growing onslaught of junk mail, legitimate e-mail was significantly delayed. On a bad day, legitimate e-mail messages sent from outside the campus could be delayed by as much as three hours, and messages sent across campus arrived up to two hours late. These slowdowns were having an increasingly negative impact on business. For example, university staff working up to the deadline to apply for research grants sometimes missed critical cutoff dates. Likewise, end-of-term projects sent by e-mail by students to their professors were sometimes received after the deadline.

This problem was also negatively affecting social life at the university. People missed lunch appointments and other invitations sent by e-mail and experienced annoying delays communicating with their families and colleagues. “Initially spam was seen as a nuisance rather than a threat, but the sheer volume eventually changed that perception,” Murphy says. “Faculty, staff, and students were losing confidence that their messages would be delivered in a timely fashion. The whole system was becoming virtually unusable.”

Solution

For faculty and staff, the benefits have been enormous. The drop-off in spam was immediately apparent, and the lack of false positives was a major benefit.  John Murphy Deputy Director of IS Services Trinity College Dublin

Trinity was already using Microsoft Windows Server® 2003 as its operating system and Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 for calendaring, and learned about Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services from its contacts at Microsoft. IT staff decided to deploy the managed service on a trial basis over a three-week period in December 2006. Trinity chose Exchange Hosted Services because it works together with Microsoft Exchange Server as well as e-mail programs built for other environments. 

“The fact that Exchange Hosted Services is ‘platform-agnostic’ was crucial to our deployment,” says Murphy. “We had planned to migrate to Exchange Server and then introduce Exchange Hosted Services, but when the spam crisis hit, we had to reverse that order and implement the service with our Unix-based e-mail environment.”

Exchange Hosted Services is composed of four distinct services: Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering protects organizations from spam, viruses, and other unwanted content; Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive ensures that messages are retained according to organizational policies and regulatory compliance rules; Microsoft Exchange Hosted Encryption encrypts data to preserve confidentiality; and Microsoft Exchange Hosted Continuity preserves access to e-mail during and after emergency situations. The services are deployed over the Internet using a “Software-as-a-Service” model, which helps minimize additional capital investment, free up IT resources to focus on other value-producing initiatives, and mitigate messaging risks before they reach the corporate firewall.

Trinity’s IT staff tested Exchange Hosted Filtering on various servers, and fine-tuned the system to ensure that it struck the right balance between effectively controlling spam and minimizing the number of false positives. The effect was immediate and spectacular. Over a period of 20 days, 12.1 million e-mail messages were sent to addresses in the Trinity domain. The Exchange Hosted Filtering service blocked 11.1 million of these e-mails—92 percent of all incoming traffic.

By January 2007, IT staff decided to deploy Exchange Hosted Services, a process that Murphy describes as “simple and effective.” “We tried it, we liked it, it worked wonderfully, and we just took it from there.”

A key part of the proposition for Trinity was a service level agreement (SLA) that gave the university the assurance it would receive 100 percent virus protection, and at least 95 percent of all spam filtered with a maximum of two minutes per e-mail scanning time, with most mail passing through in seconds. The SLA also guaranteed that no more than one in every 250,000 legitimate e-mails would be incorrectly quarantined by Exchange Hosted Filtering, equating to one false positive in every 10 years for individuals who receive an average of 100 e-mails per workday.

Exchange Hosted Filtering uses multiple filters to protect the university’s e-mail, keeping most spam from reaching Trinity’s e-mail servers. Instead, messages targeted as spam are quarantined within the Microsoft global data center network, which is load-balanced from site to site and server to server, minimizing the chances of interruption to the service. Trinity faculty, staff, and students can browse through the quarantined mail to check for false positives. The reality, however, is that such action is rarely needed because of the low level of false positives that occur under the SLA.

Benefits

By implementing the Exchange Hosted Filtering service, Trinity has reduced the number of unsolicited e-mail messages, dramatically improving staff and student productivity. The university has also saved thousands of euros, while freeing up IT labor and server space for other critical projects. 

Six months after implementation, we still have people stopping us in the corridors telling us how much they appreciate the improvement.  John Murphy Deputy Director of IS Services Trinity College Dublin

Boosts Productivity by 10,000 Hours a Week

Exchange Hosted Filtering has reduced most of the university’s incoming spam messages, freeing up the time faculty, staff, and students spent deleting invalid e-mail messages on a daily basis. This has translated into a time savings of close to 10,000 hours a week, increasing productivity across the campus.

Exchange Hosted Services has also eliminated long delays in the transmission of e-mail. Messages that once took two to three hours to reach their destination are now typically transmitted within seconds, providing faculty, staff, and students the assurance that e-mail is a reliable communication tool for exchanging vital information. 

“For faculty and staff, the benefits have been enormous,” says Murphy. “The drop-off in spam was immediately apparent, and the lack of false positives was a major benefit. Six months after implementation, we still have people stopping us in the corridors telling us how much they appreciate the improvement.”

Cost Savings of €20,000 a Year

The Exchange Hosted Filtering service has also significantly lessened the amount of time administrators spend combating spam. IT staff no longer have to continually upgrade the university’s antispam filter, and help-desk staff spend less time fielding complaints about viruses and phishing attempts. In addition, the volume of e-mail the IT department now processes has decreased by 80 percent, reducing the time required to manage these servers. Combined, these time savings have reduced labor costs by about €20,000 ($27,618) a year.

“For the IT manager, the service removes the difficulties of maintaining the antispam and antivirus services, so fewer servers and fewer systems go wrong,” Murphy says. “There are also immediate benefits regarding the volume of e-mail we handle, since we now only have to process valid e-mail messages.”

Increased Server Space Availability by 80 Percent

Because Exchange Hosted Services is a hosted Software-as-a-Service solution, it has significantly cut down the load on Trinity’s servers, freeing up valuable computing power for other purposes. With only legitimate e-mail now reaching university servers, Exchange Hosted Services has increased the available space on its four e-mail servers by 80 percent, saving Trinity the expense of buying additional servers to accommodate the flow of e-mail.

Exchange Hosted Services has also boosted IT operational efficiency, making it possible for administrators to spend less time reacting to e-mail problems and more time focusing on proactive projects.

Best of all, the university’s spam problem has been virtually eliminated, allowing staff and students to reliably incorporate e-mail into day-to-day campus life. “Exchange Hosted Services represents great value for the money,” says Murphy. “It could end up being one of the best investments we’ve ever made.”

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 Trinity College Dublin products and services, call (+353) 01 896 1000 or visit the Web site at:
www.tcd.ie

Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services

Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services (formerly FrontBridge Technologies) offer an easy-to- use way for enterprises to actively ensure the security and availability of their e-mail environment, while instilling confidence that their e-mail processes satisfy internal policy and regulatory compliance requirements. A seamless extension of Microsoft Exchange Server that operates at the Internet-level, the complete line of services includes hosted filtering for active spam and virus protection; hosted archiving to satisfy compliance requirements and internal policies; hosted encryption to preserve e-mail confidentiality; and, hosted continuity for ongoing access to e-mail during and after disasters. Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services provide value to corporate customers by requiring no upfront capital investment, minimizing IT management overhead, and removing incoming e-mail threats before they reach the corporate firewall.

For more information, visit:
www.microsoft.com/exchange

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

Document published August 2007