Conwy County Borough Council blocks 60 per cent of inbound e-mail as spam

The Council employs around 5200 staff working in many locations across the county in a wide variety of roles from refuse collector to social worker, from teacher to highway engineer.

The Council provides e-mail services to over 2000 of its employees and also provides managed e-mail services to over 75 schools with over 16500 pupils throughout the county. It is vital to Conwy County Borough Council that they can protect all e-mail users from spam and other forms of malicious attack.

Conwy County Borough Council needs to ensure that all e-mail they receive is free from malicious code or attachments for both English and Welsh-speaking users. All spam must be blocked or quarantined before it reaches the inboxes of individual users in either the Council or schools. Just as importantly, all e-mail that Conwy sends needs to comply with the Council's acceptable use policy for e-mail.

According to Adrian Hughes, Principal Network Architect at Conwy County Borough Council, 'With the drive for eGovernment services to provide citizens with access to Council services via the web and e-mail we need to be secure. We also need to provide effective e-mail security to our users. As we are also managing e-mail for schools throughout the county we need to be rigorous about ensuring that we safeguard all users from harmful, offensive or fraudulent e-mail.'

Adrian Hughes added, 'We need to ensure that our online services are as accessible as possible to citizens throughout the county and provide e-mail without compromising rigorous standards of security.'

Conwy County Borough Council engaged with Gradian, a CipherTrust partner, to propose the best solution for managing e-mail security and eliminating spam. Gradian recommended the CipherTrust IronMail appliance.

According to Adrian Hughes, 'Gradian took the time to understand our unique needs for e-mail security and propose a solution that was a perfect fit. Protecting users from inbound threats such as spam and protecting our reputation by ensuring that all outbound e-mail complies with our policy was essential. We also needed a solution that would enable us to manage easily the e-mail requirements of different groups and different languages. In particular, the security settings for the schools are different than those that apply to the Council staff.'

The IronMail solution enforces the Council's policy at the e-mail gateway to address all e-mail threats, including hackers, phishing, spam, worms and libelous content. It also provides a sophisticated connection control capability to combat spam.

Since Gradian deployed the CipherTrust IronMail appliances on behalf of Conwy County Borough Council spam and other forms of malicious threats have been virtually eliminated from their e-mail. The IronMail appliance deployed in Conwy benefit from the intelligence that CipherTrust gathers about e-mail threats from over 4,500 appliances worldwide. CipherTrust's Trusted Source reputation service (www.trustedsource.org) analyses billions of e-mails every month to ensure that every IronMail appliance is updated dynamically to deliver effective protection from known, new and emerging threats.

Users at Conwy Borough County Council and over 75 schools in the county are able to use e-mail to do their job and not waste valuable time deleting unwanted e-mails. The Council's IT department also has the assurance that the IronMail appliance is also monitoring outbound e-mail to safeguard any sensitive information and ensure compliance with the Council's e-mail policy.

According to Adrian Hughes, 'One of the joys of the solution that Gradian has provided is that the users don't need to know or do anything to be assured that their e-mail is protected. The CipherTrust IronMail does what is required to protect e-mail before it reaches the user and before any outbound e-mail leaves our e-mail gateway. With users able to manage their own quarantine digests, retrieval of legitimate email is easy and requires no administrator action.'

Related links to this article:
Conwy County Borough Council
CipherTrust
Gradian

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