4-page Case Study - Posted 4/2/2008

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Kentucky Department of Education

Educational System Cuts Spam, Millions in Costs, with Hosted E-mail Filtering Solution

The Kentucky Department of Education manages the public educational system for the state’s 174 school districts. An internal IT services group, the Office of Education Technology (OET), oversees the schools’ Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 e-mail environment, which has more than 750,000 mailboxes. That environment was plagued with a growing spam problem, which slowed down the system and resulted in lost time and productivity for students, teachers, and IT administrators. To fix the problem, OET deployed a hosted spam-filtering solution from Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services. Since then, the department has seen improved protection against spam while realizing millions of dollars in savings related to e-mail management costs. The department’s solution has also restored lost instructional and administrative time, and empowered individual school districts with better e-mail management tools.

Situation

In the month of October 2007 alone, Exchange Hosted Filtering helped us save more than $2 million for all the school districts combined.  Phil Coleman Director of Operations and Services, Office of Education Technology Kentucky Department of Education

 The Office of Education Technology (OET) is the department’s internal IT services group; within OET, a 16-person Infrastructure Support Team is responsible for managing the IT infrastructure for the entire educational system. Although each school district in the state has its own small IT staff, the majority of technical infrastructure services are provided by OET through the Kentucky Education Technology System (KETS). These services include e-mail management, security, and Internet access.

The educational system’s e-mail environment is based on the Windows® operating system and Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003, and it contains more than 750,000 mailboxes. “There’s a mailbox for each student, teacher, and administrator,” says Phil Coleman, Director of Operations and Services, OET, Kentucky Department of Education. “It’s a critical messaging system for all users. Students rely on it to communicate with teachers, and administrators use it to send important information to teachers via distribution lists.”

Unfortunately, the e-mail system experienced a growing spam problem. Of the approximately 9 million e-mail messages that came into the network each day, only 250,000 were legitimate. “The spam issue was a huge challenge,” remarks Coleman. “Some of the spam was offensive. Also, the whole network was getting backed up, and we could not deliver legitimate e-mail messages to users. Our system was not capable of handling that much traffic.”

As a result, it would often be four or five days before a legitimate e-mail message reached its intended recipient. “If it was around the holidays, there would be even more spam, and legitimate messages would take even longer to reach addressees,” Coleman says.

Because of this, school e-mail users and IT administrators alike experienced decreased productivity. “Teachers and administrators were sending important business e-mails that weren’t getting to the superintendent’s office, for example,” says Coleman. “It slowed down test reporting, student evaluations, and other processes.”

Lost technical support time was also a major issue. “My staff was working many extra hours at night and on weekends to try and control the spam problem,” Coleman continues. “We focused all our time on dealing with that, and it kept us from doing our other support work.”

Although OET had an internal e-mail filtering solution in place, it was costly and clearly not effective at handling the massive amount of spam. “It was obvious that we had to fix this issue, because it had such a deep impact on so many people,” says Coleman. “We knew we had to consider implementing an external filtering service.”

Solution

The multiple filtering engines and constant protection around the clock means we don’t even have to think about spam now. Exchange Hosted Filtering has really improved our ability to protect the e-mail environment.  Phil Coleman Director of Technical Operations, Office of Educational Technology Kentucky Department of Education

In June 2007, KETS contracted with Exchange Hosted Services to deploy the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering service. With this service, all incoming KETS e-mail messages are routed through the Microsoft global data-center network, where multiple filters screen out spam, viruses, and other security threats before passing the messages to the KETS e-mail servers. If a data center in the network is unavailable, traffic is automatically sent to a different data center, without interrupting the service. The service also uses Microsoft algorithms to analyze and route message traffic between data centers, which means companies’ networks receive the timeliest and most efficient e-mail delivery possible.

IT administrators also can quickly and easily review e-mail marked as spam, which is quarantined at the data center network for up to 15 days. These messages can also be sent to a specific user’s mailbox, such as that of a district IT administrator, for review. “We thought this feature would be ideal for the school district IT employees,” Coleman says. “It provides them with their own e-mail management capabilities.”

Exchange Hosted Filtering is deployed over the Internet, with no need to modify the existing e-mail infrastructure; a simple mail exchange record change gets the process started. As a result, the overall investment was manageable for KETS. “As far as our IT resources go, it seemed like a very good deal, considering what we thought we might get out of it in terms of protection against spam,” Coleman says.

Benefits

Using Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering, the Kentucky Department of Education has been able to greatly protect its messaging infrastructure against spam and viruses. As a result, the department is seeing drastically reduced IT services costs and is restoring valuable instructional and administrative time. The solution also makes it possible to provide school district IT administrators with better spam-management capabilities.

Improves Protection against Spam and Outside Threats

Within one month of deploying its new spam-filtering solution, the Kentucky Department of Education noticed that spam messages simply weren’t entering the network. In October 2007, for example, the hosted service handled almost 48 million e-mail messages for the entire KETS-managed Exchange Server environment. “We determined that about 37 million of those messages were either spam or viruses, none of which were allowed to go to student, teacher, or school administrator mailboxes,” says Coleman.

Because it offers protection against spam, viruses, malware, and other threats, Exchange Hosted Filtering gives KETS IT administrators confidence that they did not have before. “The multiple filtering engines and constant protection around the clock means we don’t even have to think about spam now,” Coleman says. “Exchange Hosted Filtering has really improved our ability to protect the e-mail environment and deliver mail in a timely manner.”

Exchange Hosted Filtering eliminates almost all of our incoming spam, so we can now concentrate fully on daily IT tasks such as configuration, patch management, and general maintenance issues.  Phil Coleman Director of Technical Operations, Office of Educational Technology Kentucky Department of Education

Reduces IT Costs by Millions of Dollars

By deploying Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering, the Kentucky Department of Education avoided spending millions of dollars that might have otherwise been spent on spam management. The department calculated that the average amount previously spent per user to process spam had been U.S.$77 per month, factoring in loss of productivity, network utilization, and data storage. Using that figure, the department says that by using Exchange Hosted Filtering to filter spam, instead of requiring administrative staff members to process those messages, it saved more than $11 million in productivity dollars in October 2007.
 
“We also did an extensive cost analysis comparing the costs we’re paying for this service to what we would have spent on other filtering services,” says Coleman. “In the month of October 2007 alone, Exchange Hosted Filtering helped us save more than $2 million for all the school districts combined.” According to Coleman, the industry average cost per message to filter spam is $.06, meaning it would have cost $2,190,773 for the month of October if KDE had paid the industry rate. “By using Exchange Hosted Filtering instead of other spam filtering services, the Kentucky Department of Education and the Kentucky K–12 school districts saved $2,154,261 in the month of October,” he says.

Restores Lost Instructional and Administrative Time

The Kentucky Department of Education is also giving back valuable student instructional time thanks to Exchange Hosted Filtering. The department recently conducted a review of lost instructional time related to the massive amount of unwanted e-mail messages. Estimating that the average time spent handling one piece of spam is five seconds, the department determined that, in aggregate, it is saving teachers and students more than 40,000 hours of classroom time by reducing spam with Exchange Hosted Filtering.

The new solution is also restoring lost time to the 16-person OET Infrastructure Support Team. “We simply don’t have to spend any time on spam management anymore,” says Coleman. “Exchange Hosted Filtering eliminates almost all of our incoming spam, so we can now concentrate fully on daily IT tasks such as configuration, patch management, and general maintenance issues.”

Increases Productivity

Because Exchange Hosted Filtering is so effective at filtering spam and analyzing and routing message traffic, e-mail messages are now sent and received within the KETS network practically instantaneously. As a result, teachers and administrators can be more productive, completing student evaluations and other tasks much more quickly and efficiently.

The success of Exchange Hosted Filtering has also meant a big reduction in help-desk calls from teachers and administrators. “Because those users are no longer frustrated from waiting for important e-mail messages, they aren’t calling us anymore. That gives us even more of an opportunity to focus on our jobs supporting other important instructional technology services for our schools.”

Provides Better E-mail Management for Individual School Districts

With Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering, individual school districts now have access to better spam management tools. Most notably, the districts can now see quarantined e-mail messages if they need to, because the service provides district IT employees with HTML-based e-mail messages that summarize all tracked spam. “With these capabilities, it is easier for them to manage spam within their own districts,” says Coleman.

District administrators also can apply custom policies to outbound e-mail messages to monitor and manage messages based on size, subject, content, or other attributes. “This is important, because our schools and the Office of Education Technology are advocates of good digital citizenship,” says Coleman. “In addition, all of these features are helping administrators to be caretakers of their own district’s e-mail, and that helps make all of our jobs easier.

“Overall, Exchange Hosted Filtering has had a tremendously positive impact at all levels of the Department of Education.”

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 Kentucky Department of Education, call (502) 564-4770 or visit the Web site at:
www.education.ky.gov/KDE/

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www.microsoft.com/servers

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Document published March 2008