Network Security
Athletics win with antivirus
Low-cost, easy-to-deploy software defeats spam at Penn State University.
Philip Mansfield, systems administrator for intercollegiate athletics at Penn State University, found that existing antivirus software was not dependable.
Universities and colleges
often face a more challenging IT and network
security challenge than typical corporate
networks. With the rise of peer-to-peer
(P2P), file sharing and MP3 trading,
campuses have become a haven for viruses and
spyware. By nature, these networks are
fairly open and unsegmented. Penn State
University is no exception.
"Part of the
responsibility of our IT administrators is
to recognize flaws and vulnerable points of
contention within our e-mail program,
systems and networks by proactively
assessing and safeguarding them before any
significant turmoil begins," says Philip
Mansfield, systems administrator for
intercollegiate athletics at Penn State
University. "While Penn State has some
robust systems in place, the functionality
of our antispam software was at risk.
"The e-mail antivirus
software we were using was tied directly
into the Outlook mail server, and, at times,
when an outside problem occurred with the
mail server, it could become necessary to
shut down antivirus functions completely,
causing serious impact," he says. "More than
one instance of server problems slowing the
network and causing multiple delays affected
e-mail performance for the coaches,
professors and support staff. A change
needed to be made."
Penn State utilizes
existing in-house antivirus software, which
is installed directly onto the Outlook
e-mail server. Due to the typical amount of
spam within any educational institution,
there is a need to have antispam and
antivirus software running. The existing
back-end server was in place and handling
the basics of e-mail security; however, this
system had a setup where all the extra
features were set up as add-ons and were not
getting the optimum performance for the
money. Optical character recognition (OCR)
and virus scanning, for example, were much
desired benefits, but came at a price.
Mansfield decided to look
for a better method to support the group. To
supplement the existing antivirus software
already installed, he sought a front-end
gateway SMTP solution. "We were looking for
a solution that would provide greater spam
filtration, as well as freeing up the
workload of the back-end provider," he
explains.
PREMIUM SCAN, ATTRACTIVE
PRICE
"Penn State works like
most education institutions with a focus on
best-practice results from any software
purchases, while adhering to a tightly
managed budget," Mansfield offers.
"Therefore, we needed a solution that would
allow a premium antivirus scan at an
attractive price."
Embedding text in images
is a popular spamming practice to avoid text
processing in antispam engines. OCR enables
the spam firewall to analyze the text
rendered inside the images. To mitigate
attempts by spammers to foil OCR through
speckling, shading or color manipulation,
the spam firewall uses a number of
lightweight image-processing technologies to
normalize the images prior to the OCR phase.
"We wanted a full range
of antivirus, antispam, antispyware and
content security solutions, which can
protect all aspects of an institution's IT
network, servers and personal computers," he
explains. "After a thorough evaluation of
several, we chose to use SpamTitan for it's
advanced antispam filtering and ease of use.
We especially liked the fact that we could
download it and try it out free of charge
for a period of time. For the features we
were gaining, most antispam software came
with a much higher price tag than the $1,000
that we paid for 500 licenses.
"Image spam represents
about one-third of all traffic on the
Internet," he says. "SpamTitan uses
image-analysis techniques that protect
against new image variants. OCR is one such
technique that seems to work ."
EASY DOWNLOAD PROCESS
"The downloading process
was simple and straightforward," he says, "a
matter of answering a few simple questions,
making a few minor system reconfigurations.
It was running for all 500 licenses within
an hour. The test drive download suited us
particularly well in that we could see what
messages would be blocked.
"We also appreciated the
intuitive methodology, which meant that we
could have any of our questions answered
online before needing to contact a support
staff," he continues. "When we compare the
advanced antispam filtering capabilities,
the software's ease of use, fast deployment
and affordable price to other antivirus
software packages and installation
procedures, the savings and ROI are
substantial. "
Once the software was
deployed, Mansfield's team saw immediate
results. Users no longer were required to go
through a long list of e-mails each day to
weed through spam messages. Where some
personnel were receiving more than 300
messages in quarantine daily, there are now
only 10, with a greater than 99 percent
accuracy level. Even with a cautious
quarantine level in place, daily spam
reporting has gone from an average of 1,900
per day to 210 per day.
"Although it is
impossible to completely eliminate receiving
spam, we have found that utilizing
SpamTitan's spam filter helped reduce the
amount of unwanted messages and has
eliminated the need to shut down the virus
scan for outside problems," Mansfield says.
"Another attractive feature was the method
whereby phishing attempts are classified as
a virus. In this manner, it would not allow
the end-user to accidentally pass these
along.
"It was important to find a solution that
offers not only e-mail security but also
protection from viruses, Trojans, phishing
and unwanted content," he adds.
For more information
(click here)
Data protection with SaaS
by Andrew Wenger
Software-as-a-service
(SaaS) offerings can provide small and
midsize businesses (SMBs) with access to
software remotely as a Web-based service.
SaaS data protection provides online backup
and recovery and can meet broader
information-management requirements, such as
archiving, compliance, search and disaster
recovery. With SaaS-based data protection,
SMBs can elevate current capabilities beyond
backup and recovery, while reducing costs
and administrative overhead.
According to Enterprise
Strategy Group, 86 percent of organizations
use tape-based backups. While the
portability of tape lets organizations
fulfill disaster-recovery requirements, the
inherent slowness of these backups and
restores, as well as reliability issues, are
validating the accelerated adoption of
disk-based solutions and growing interest in
SaaS-based alternatives.
Another reason to
consider SaaS: increased pressure to retain
data longer in accordance with corporate
compliance or industry regulations. As
information typically exists in different
formats and different applications,
determining the best way to provide access
and respond to compliance requests can be
daunting, due to hidden costs and
administrative complications.
With SaaS-based data
protection, companies have the potential to
reduce or even eliminate hardware, software,
tape media and offsite media shipping
expenses. Another advantage is the ability
to meet service-level guarantees while
gaining the assurances of successful backups
and timely, efficient file restores.
Predictable pricing also is a plus, as
fixed, monthly expenses are easier to budget
than large, sometimes unforeseen
expenditures.
Most MSPs possess an
understanding of what is required to meet
service-level agreements, as 24/7 monitoring
and management is a core IT services
offering. MSPs also typically provide
appropriate bandwidth-throttling
capabilities to lessen network impact during
backup and recovery operations. They often
specialize in supporting mission-critical
databases and usually are knowledgeable
about compliance and regulatory audits.
Online backup and
recovery is the first step toward the
delivery of multiple services, such as
replication, deduplication, archiving,
search and e-discovery. The key for SMBs is
finding the MSP partner that can easily and
economically keep pace with additional
services without disruptions to existing
environments.
An MSP's ability to offer
SMB subscribers different tiers of storage
for varying types of information, along with
corresponding cost structures, will ease the
addition of archiving capabilities. For
example, an SMB that wants to keep 30 days
of backups on disk for expedited recoveries,
while archiving older files to tape, should
enjoy lower costs for supporting the
archived information.
Companies that leverage
deduplication can dramatically lower backup,
recovery and long-term retention costs by
eliminating data redundancy and reducing
disk capacity requirements. For SMBs in
highly regulated environments, search and
e-discovery may be necessary after backup
and recovery. Federated keyword and content
searches across file shares and multiple
applications, such as Microsoft Exchange,
SharePoint and Lotus Domino, are a plus for
any organization where search, discovery and
litigation support are of paramount
importance.
Andrew Wenger is director, SMB segment, for CommVault Systems, Oceanport, N.J
For more information
(click here)