Orange County Improves E-Mail Security While Reducing Costs

Orange County, Calif., has selected Secure Computing Corporation to protect its IT network with a unified set of Secure Computing products. Addressing multiple threat vectors, the complete Secure Computing solution incorporated anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-malware, e-mail filtering and encryption, data protection, Web filtering, intrusion prevention and protection from blended attacks. In addition, the county government has been able to achieve enterprise-class security while keeping management overhead to a minimum.

Orange County IT executives report that the new security has significantly improved productivity. "Secure Computing's line of fully integrated solutions protects the county from both internal and external dangers, allowing my staff to focus on managing security instead of constantly reacting to threats," said Tony Lucich, CISO for the Orange County office of information technology.

According to Lucich, the county selected Secure Computing because it combines multiple best-of-breed security protections into all-in-one appliances. "We didn't want to have to deal with managing multiple boxes strung together," stated Lucich. "We needed a big picture solution to deal with the large increase we've seen in threats like spam and viruses."

Spam accounts for 97 percent of all e-mail threatening to enter Orange County's network. In order to block that unwanted e-mail, the county relies on Secure Computing's TrustedSource security system, which gathers historical and real-time global intelligence in order to provide pro-active threat blocking.

"Based on our own first-hand experience, companies that integrate the TrustedSource module into their existing load balancers, firewalls or other technologies are going to see a vast improvement in their spam filtering," predicted Lucich. "This technology allows us to save thousands of dollars every day in lower e-mail administration costs, dramatically reduces the need to buy additional servers to process increased mail volumes and, perhaps most importantly, saves us an estimated $42,000 a day in employee productivity that would otherwise be lost to dealing with spam."

TrustedSource provides such impressive results by assigning reputation-based scores to Internet hosts and devices based on their behavior, in much the same way that credit bureaus assign credit scores. As a result, Secure Computing appliances drop more than 70 percent of unwanted traffic at the outer edge of Orange County's network, long before it can do any harm.