Salford City Council case study

Background

Salford, located 200 miles Northwest of London, was one of Britain's first industrial cities. Now home to nearly 220,000 residents it is a vibrant and modern city, offering its citizens a variety of services. Salford City Council is responsible for maintaining the technology and communications infrastructure that links close to 500 sites across the region and includes education, health, library, and park services. Schools and hospitals, offices and community centres are now equipped with high speed networks.

The Challenge

Salford City Council communicates with residents and businesses primarily via email. With 10,000 employees spread across the region, Salford City Council receives some 1.5 million emails a week all through a single mail gateway, making management a particular challenge. IT managers need to ensure that genuine emails gets through, while blocking the high volumes of spam and preventing malicious phishing emails, viruses and other malware.

The WatchGuard® Solution

To combat the rapidly growing levels of spam and malicious emails, Salford City Council chose the new generation of WatchGuard XCS (Extensible Content Security) appliances for email and web 2.0 content security. Salford had been a customer of Borderware for six years and following WatchGuard's acquisition of Borderware in 2009, the decision was made to upgrade to the XCS range.

Benefits

One of the key factors in this decision was the latest 3rd generation of the WatchGuard ReputationAuthority service that acts as a first line of defense and blocks a high proportion of spam at the gateway before it even enters the content filters. ReputationAuthority does not work on pre-defined black lists like many 2nd generation systems; instead identifying emails from known spam sources based on their IP address and rejecting connections outright at the perimeter while also blocking messages designed to evade traditional content based detection.

A good reputation counts

"With ReputationAuthority, we immediately identify as spam and block around 95% of all email messages at the gateway," said Joe Whiteley, ICT Infrastructure Specialist at Salford City Council. "By rejecting spam and web-based threats from reaching the network we are able to optimise bandwidth, improve the performance of email throughput and prevent malware getting onto the network."

For emails not blocked by ReputationAuthority, the WatchGuard XCS units allow for much finer control for deep content based inspection and contextual analysis based on a database of around 1000 configurable rules, providing defense-in-depth for stronger protection from malware and spam blockage. These messages are quarantined for evaluation by an administrator who can either delete the message or pass it on to the recipient.

"As a public body we can't simply reject emails so it is important that genuine messages get to the right person," says Whiteley. "But we also need to be very careful to prevent malicious emails. In every 1 million emails received we will typically block around 300 – 400 viruses or other types of malware that could potentially cause havoc with our systems and data."

Migration made easy

With the help of WatchGuard and its reseller Bluefort, the migration from Salford's Borderware products to the new generation of WatchGuard XCS appliances was seamless. Two WatchGuard XCS 770 appliances are installed at two different locations and provide 100 percent availability with fail over support and queue replication. The WatchGuard XCS is the only messaging solution that will ensure the mail queue is also replicated across the other appliances to ensure that even unprocessed mail is maintained.

"We need to take responsibility of all mail messages as soon as they have been received – losing messages in the queue is not an option," says Joe Whiteley. Cost was also a key factor in Salford's decision when choosing WatchGuard. "It was the only solution we looked at that offered unlimited licensing based on throughput rather than user-based pricing," adds Whiteley. "This means we can scale the user-base without incurring further costs."

Increasing protection

Salford is now looking at using its XCS appliances for managing outbound emails and data loss prevention. The XCS devices allow organisations to ensure that the content of outgoing email messages and web-based content is in strict accord with confidentiality policies. It does this automatically through compliance dictionaries, content filtering, e-profiling and outbound content and attachment control and scanning. For example, it will detect key words or data such as bank account or credit card numbers and block the emails if appropriate. In addition, it will work with third-party e-mail encryption software such as PGP used at Salford, to automatically encrypt outgoing emails if they are classified or identified by the XCS appliance as sensitive or confidential.

"The WatchGuard XCS appliance combined with innovative cloud-based ReputationAuthority technology give us a comprehensive platform for email and Web 2.0 content security, while providing a fully scalable solution for managing both inbound and outbound messaging," says Joe Whiteley. "The volume and sophistication of spam and malicious emails will only increase but here in Salford we are well prepared to handle these challenges."

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