The University of Liverpool uses GFI MailSecurity to provide email security in a clustered environment

Company: University of Liverpool
Location: Liverpool, United Kingdom
Contact: Steve Aldridge
Designation: Team Leader
Industry: Education
Number of mailboxes: 34,000
Email volume: 8m messages a month
Solution: GFI MailSecurity

Quick read

The University of Liverpool is one of the UK's leading universities. It is a member of the Russell Group of research-led universities and has over 24,000 registered students in various faculties. Email is the primary means of communication and the University required a solution to ensure that no viruses are introduced into the network by those accessing their mail. For maximum protection, the University wanted a product that provided multiple anti-virus engine protection and that could be implemented in a clustered environment. After looking at various products, the University of Liverpool chose GFI MailSecurity.

Challenges

The University of Liverpool is one of the UK’s leading tertiary education institutions and has 306 first-degree courses offered across 103 subjects, over 24,000 registered students, 3,000 plus students registered for continuing education, over 5,000 students registered on Professional Development, an annual income of £219 million, which includes £75 million for research, and over 4,500 staff.

Email is the university’s primary mode of communication and the computer network delivers over 8 million email messages each month to over 50,000 different locations – or the equivalent of 400,000 email messages a day. This high dependency on email means that providing protection against viruses, malware and other malicious attacks is a critical function. With such a large university population making use of the computer network every day, the University required an anti-virus product that offered optimum protection at server level and ensured that each email was clean of malicious content before it reached each one of the 30,000 plus mailboxes.

Apart from buying a solution that offered multiple anti-virus engines – thus being able to react fastest to the latest virus threats by receiving the quickest virus signature updates and taking advantage of each one’s strengths because no single AV scanner can provide total protection – the major issue for the University was that the product ran in a clustered environment.

“We were looking for a cost effective anti-virus solution for Microsoft Exchange that worked in a clustered environment. This was an extremely important consideration for us,” Steve Aldridge, Team Leader at the University’s Computing Services Department said.

The Solution

Recognizing the urgency and need for such a product, the University started looking for a software solution on the market that met its three requirements: price-performance, multiple anti-virus engine functionality and support for clustering.

After trying out various solutions, the University came across GFI MailSecurity, an anti-virus solution that perfectly suited the University’s needs. The solution also ships at a very competitive price, taking into consideration the budget restrictions faced by many entities, particularly educational institutions.

“A number of other products were evaluated but rejected because of cost or incompatibility with a clustered environment,” Mr. Aldridge explained. “We found GFI MailSecurity to be best suited to our requirements,” he added.

Implementation

One of the issues that the University’s IT teams discovered during their product evaluation exercise was that the operation of some products was not always straightforward.

“We were in the process of commissioning a new Exchange system having decided to migrate from our older email system. As email is such an important service, we chose to run the service on an eight node cluster. This presented problems for some of the software we tried during failover tests. The GFI solution proved to be easy to install and configure and it behaved perfectly during failover,” Mr. Aldridge explained.

“Furthermore, having the choice of multiple engines was an added feature which we wanted,” he added.

Target reached

“An anti-virus product has no other quantifiable benefits over and above detecting email viruses. The main issue for us is that it continues to work well in an un-intrusive way for both the application and the end users. This sounds obvious, but we all know of cases where this isn’t so.”

Links

For more information visit GFI MailSecurity.