4-page Case Study - Posted 7/10/2007

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Oakwood Worldwide

Housing Provider Uses Hosted Filtering and Continuity Services to Reduce E-Mail Costs

Oakwood Worldwide provides temporary furnished housing in the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Asia Pacific region. In 2004, the company’s existing spam and virus filter was too time-consuming to maintain. After evaluating options, Oakwood subscribed to the Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Filtering service. In 2006, the company subscribed to the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Continuity service to ensure that employees could access e-mail even if the primary e-mail server became unavailable. Oakwood also replaced its on-site filtering solution, ScanMail from Trend Micro, with Microsoft Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server. As a result, Oakwood has virtually eliminated spam, improved help desk productivity, and reduced e-mail costs. The company also has accelerated the time it takes to recover the e-mail system, delivering seamless access to e-mail should an outage occur.

Situation

Exchange Hosted Continuity has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars. The service has allowed us to essentially check off our e-mail system from our yearly disaster recovery plan.  Mario Ramos Manager of System Support Oakwood Worldwide

Oakwood Worldwide includes numerous divisions in three global regions: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Asia Pacific. The divisions in each of the three regions have separate IT systems and staff. The Asia Pacific and European divisions employ approximately 900 people, and the balance works in the company’s U.S. operations.

The employees in the United States rely on e-mail as the primary source of communication. The majority of customers contact Oakwood using e-mail to investigate housing options and to book reservations. Similarly, the company uses e-mail to communicate with customers and confirm reservations. In April 2007, the divisions in the United States received approximately 14 million e-mail messages from outside the company.

The U.S. divisions rely on Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 Enterprise Edition and Windows Server® 2003 Enterprise Edition to deliver e-mail services. Two clustered HP BL45p Blade server computers, located at a data center in Los Angeles, support the e-mail system. Employees access e-mail using WYSE thin client computers or desktop computers. Both types of employee systems run the Microsoft Office Outlook® 2003 messaging and collaboration client.

In 2004, 80 percent of all e-mail messages received by the divisions in the United States were spam. To remedy these issues, the company evaluated third-party filtering offerings. For several months, Oakwood used a product from Trend Micro called ScanMail to provide filtering services.

“We found that our system administrators, who also administered our e-mail system, were spending too much time doing maintenance and administration,” says Mario Ramos, Manager of System Support at Oakwood Worldwide. “There were a lot of filters and triggers that had to be manually created, and then constantly tweaked. We started getting complaints from our users because they were still receiving 10–15 spam messages a day.”

Solution

In November 2004, Oakwood heard about Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services and its four service options for customers using Exchange Server. After careful evaluation, Oakwood decided to sign up for one of the options: the Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering service.

A representative from Exchange Hosted Services came to the Oakwood data center and collected information from the e-mail system. The very next day, the representative called Oakwood and had an administrator reconfigure the mail exchange (MX) record so that Exchange Hosted Filtering would receive all incoming e-mail messages. By pointing the one MX record to the servers at Microsoft, the e-mail servers at Oakwood would be invisible to malicious mailers using Domain Name System (DNS) lookups.

One other configuration change Oakwood made was to update the firewall so that it would only accept inbound Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) traffic on port 25 from the Microsoft network. By doing so, malicious mailers would be unable to send unwanted e-mail messages through a back door directly to an Oakwood server’s IP address.

There were a lot of different filtering services available,... but there wasn’t one other solution or vendor that did everything that the Exchange Hosted Continuity service does.  Mario Ramos Manager of System Support Oakwood Worldwide

Creating a Disaster Recovery Plan

In early 2006, the Oakwood divisions in the United States began working on a disaster recovery plan for its e-mail systems. IT personnel considered creating a shadow site in Phoenix, Arizona, where the company’s other disaster recovery system is housed. In addition, employees evaluated several hosted services including Exchange Hosted Continuity—another offering available through Exchange Hosted Services. During this evaluation time period, Oakwood experienced a two-day e-mail service outage as a result of a hardware failure. After weighing the importance of e-mail services, the costs associated with each disaster recovery option, and the level of system availability each option could provide, Oakwood chose Exchange Hosted Continuity.

“There were a lot of different filtering services available, including one from Verizon, but there wasn’t one other solution or vendor that did everything that Exchange Hosted Continuity does,” says Ramos. “The other services always had something missing—either the e-mail services weren’t in real time, or the duration that e-mail messages were saved wasn’t as long as what Exchange Hosted Continuity provides. Exchange Hosted Continuity also allowed us to receive e-mail messages in the case of an outage and to send e-mail messages from Oakwood.com. At the time, this capability was unique to the service. The other vendors we looked at could only receive e-mail messages. Wrapping our filtering and continuity solution into basically one offering from a leading industry player also played a big role in our decision.”

In June 2006, Oakwood signed up for Exchange Hosted Continuity. “It was very easy to start the service,” Ramos explains. “The process was similar to when we started Exchange Hosted Filtering. We had to make some very minor changes to Exchange Server, such as publishing all of our internal and external e-mail messages to servers at Microsoft.”

How the Services Work

Exchange Hosted Filtering routes all the incoming and outgoing e-mail messages through the Microsoft global data center network. Directory services analyze the connections sending incoming messages, and block any message sent from an illegitimate source. Next, a series of spam, policy enforcement, and antivirus engines analyze each message according to configuration settings. The engines quarantine all captured spam and messages that violate corporate policies for up to 15 days.

Exchange Hosted Continuity copies all incoming and outgoing messages and stores them in a security-enhanced message repository for 30 days. If the e-mail server at Oakwood becomes unavailable for any reason, employees can access a copy of their e-mail account using Web-based e-mail tools.

Adding an Additional Layer of Security

Even though the company was using Exchange Hosted Services, Oakwood had continued to use ScanMail as an added layer of protection against spam and viruses within the corporate firewall. However, in October 2006, the application was causing some performance issues. Rather than upgrading the software as scheduled, Oakwood evaluated filtering applications that could monitor clustered servers and chose Microsoft Forefront™ Security for Exchange Server. “We downloaded a trial version of Forefront Security for Exchange Manager and within two weeks we were using it on our production system,” notes Ramos. “We have been very happy with it ever since.”

Benefits

As a result of its use of Exchange Hosted Services and Forefront Security for Exchange Server, Oakwood has reduced costs, virtually eliminated spam, and improved help desk productivity. In addition, the company has accelerated the time it takes to recover a mailbox or the entire system.

The Exchange Hosted Filtering service has saved our administrators time and allowed our help desk to provide quicker resolution to issues such as e-mail discrepancies.  Mario Ramos Manager of System Support Oakwood Worldwide

Reduced Costs

Oakwood chose to subscribe to Microsoft Exchange Hosted Continuity rather than invest in other disaster recovery options. “Our plan for a shadow site included money allocated for purchasing hardware and getting additional backup equipment,” Ramos says. “Additional money and time would have also been spent on shipping tapes to Phoenix and having them restored on the remote servers.

“Exchange Hosted Continuity has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Ramos continues. “The service has allowed us to essentially check off our e-mail system from our yearly disaster recovery plan. I haven’t had to spend one minute on our disaster recovery plans for e-mail since we subscribed to it. We haven’t had to acquire any servers. We haven’t had to purchase or lease a site. And we haven’t had to install or manage any data lines.”

Eliminated Spam

Since Oakwood engaged Exchange Hosted Filtering, spam is no longer an issue. “Ninety-six percent of the 14 million e-mail messages we received last month were spam,” explains Ramos. “This means that 13.6 million e-mail messages are never seen by our users because of Exchange Hosted Filtering.”

Viruses have also been eradicated. “Since we rolled out Exchange Hosted Filtering, we have not had any type of e-mail system outage or any other system impact caused by a virus,” Ramos notes.

Improved Employee Productivity

Before Oakwood engaged Exchange Hosted Services, help desk representatives used to spend hours on the phone managing multiple calls per week regarding spam. In addition, administrators had to spend an inordinate amount of time managing spam filters and triggers. Today, employees spend almost no time managing or dealing with spam, and help desk representatives receive maybe one call a week about spam.

Another way in which Oakwood has captured time is making it easier for employees to access their spam folder. “In the past, when an employee thought a good email message was caught in the spam filter, the employee contacted the help desk,” Ramos says. “Then he or she had to wait at least an hour for an administrator to check the spam folder on the e-mail server. Today, if a message is missing, a help desk technician walks the user through the process of signing onto the spam quarantine. This takes maybe two minutes. Exchange Hosted Filtering has saved our administrators time and allowed our help desk to provide quicker resolution to issues such as e-mail discrepancies.”

When administrators want information about the filtering service, they simply request a report through the Exchange Hosted Filtering administrative console. Employees can choose either Adobe PDF or Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheet software for the output. “The reporting features are easy to use,” notes Ramos. “It is great to be able to run a very detailed report in less than 10 minutes. I personally view the Top 10 report on a regular basis. It is a quick way to find trouble spots or just to glance at which user or service account is getting the most hits.”

Accelerated System Recovery Time

Exchange Hosted Continuity makes restoration easy, whether administrators need to restore one e-mail message, a user’s mailbox, or the entire e-mail system. “In the past, if someone had a damaged mailbox, or if they had accidentally deleted a message, first we had to check if the backup equipment was free,” explains Ramos. “Then we had to pull tapes from storage or from off site. After we restored the database to a remote server, we restored the lost or corrupt data back onto the user’s system. In the best-case scenario, the restoration usually took between two and three hours. In the worst case, it could take a day or a day-and-a-half. With Exchange Hosted Continuity, the process for restoring a corrupted mailbox or a deleted message takes about 10–15 minutes using the Mass Restoration function.”

If there is an outage, employees can still use e-mail to communicate with customers and other employees. They simply access a copy of their mailbox using the Exchange Hosted Continuity Web-based e-mail tools. Once administrators restore the primary e-mail system, employees can go back to using Outlook 2003 to access their mailbox on the Oakwood servers.

“It’s nice to know that if there ever is an e-mail failure—whether a data circuit goes down at the home office or if we have a power failure—our e-mail system is still going to be available,” concludes Ramos.

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:
http://www.microsoft.com/

For more information about Oakwood Worldwide products and services, call (310) 478-1021 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.oakwood.com/

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 July 2007