The City of Frederick’s IT Department Outsources & Eliminates SPAM

Swift Purify: Cloud Spam Product IT Case Study

Customer Profile:

The City of Frederick is the hub of arts, culture, commerce and government within Frederick County, MD. Located less than an hour from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD, Frederick is the second largest city in Maryland with 65,000 residents. Frederick offers a balanced and thriving economy, a highly educated workforce, and a quality of life that is nothing short of enviable.

The IT department’s main goal is to maximize the City’s effectiveness and efficiency in providing services and information to its citizens. In achieving this goal, the IT department keeps abreast of information technology, manages improvements to City systems, manages training programs and maintains all components of the City’s systems. Desktops and servers are updated yearly, along with work productivity software and information systems software. The IT department maintains the wide area network to improve workflow, and keep all City departments in contact with each other.

www.cityoffrederick.com

Challenges:

The City of Frederick’s network infrastructure uses Microsoft (MS) Exchange as their email communication platform. The City’s IT team managed and filtered email and virus-infected spam on their internal network with a combination of software based solutions. Each day they were hit with tens of thousands of spam messages destined for their mail domain, which was hosted inside their network. This network not only supported City Hall but most of the other governmental division offices within the municipality. The MS Exchange platform was bogged down with email traffic that was coming through their corporate firewall and the sheer amount of inbound messages was causing problems for users, creating performance issues for the mail server, and Internet bandwidth usage was increasing every day.

Approach & Solution:

The stark contrast between outsourced cloud solutions versus an on-premise solution is that the on-premise needs to be managed within an internal network whether it’s a separate device or a software application that runs on the server. Swift Purify is a “cloud” spam elimination product offered by Swift Systems. The big freight train of spam, emails containing malware and malicious viruses or attachments that come barreling down on a network and Internet connection, are removed so it never reaches an internal network. Precious bandwidth is conserved for critical City operations.

Because of these benefits, the City’s IT Manager decided to outsource email filtering to Swift and use Swift’s Purify to address the City’s email issues. Swift Purify only delivers the important emails and automatically filters out all of the obvious junk messages based on advanced learning algorithms and organizational or personal priorities. Each user can go further than that and easily validate individual email senders, and define personalized blacklists. In other words, individuals designate junk messages or move a message to a safe list from a daily individual summary report of “gray” messages. The Swift IT team manages the spam filtering set up, which does not require any end user changes. Swift also manages the various security features, product updates, and needed systems reports. The City IT department now also has 24/7 local support if any spam or email issues arise, so they can focus on other high priority IT support requests.

Results & Benefits:

The City of Frederick IT department no longer loses time managing cumbersome and ineffective junk email elimination software or the network issues related to spam. Swift Purify offers a comprehensive email enhancement package that not only blocks spam and malware, but combines granular policy management, real-time visibility into email activity, the ability to offload massive volume and huge files, and as an added benefit the system will also queue inbound email in the event of an email system outage at the City. Swift Purify uses powerful encryption technology and has all of the necessary security features for secure communications – anti-phishing, anti-spam, anti-spoofing, anti-spyware, denial of service, directory harvesting protection, anti-virus, and inbound and outbound quarantines. As a result of the outsourced “cloud” spam filtration, the overall email system is no longer cluttered with unwanted spam messages, overall performance is improved, and the City’s staff work experience is dramatically improved. The City’s IT department is able to control costs by avoiding unnecessary server or bandwidth upgrades and they can rely on the Swift IT team to handle any future issues that arise.

To download this case study.

About Swift Systems:

Swift Systems serves regional businesses as a provider of IT engineering and consulting services, colocation, and other cloud-based services from two Swift Systems owned and managed data centers. Our dynamic infrastructure services and data management solutions help growing organizations solve their business challenges and successfully leverage their IT investments. We define flexible architecture for organizations that allow them to grow their businesses knowing that their network and critical storage and computing platforms can easily and cost effectively scale to meet their ever expanding needs. Swift Systems – a certified veteran owned small business and leading managed information technology (IT) solutions provider that delivers the highest level of technology based IT services to businesses, government agencies, and institutions throughout Maryland, the District of Columbia, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and West Virginia.

Let our Specialists take care of your IT Support