Fred Olsen
Cruise Lines, the Norwegian-owned, UK-based
shipping firm, has saved nearly £40,000 by installing an e-mail
security appliance to service its fleet and head office
communications.
Andrew Ericsson, the company's IT and network manager, said the
installation of two
clustered MailMarshal e10000 appliances at its Ipswich head
office had enabled it to slash the number of servers and software
licences and the amount of time spent administering e-mail
security.
Fred Olsen had been using a software-based system, Mail Sweeper,
for two years. But escalating mail traffic had made it unstable,
said Ericsson. "We were getting 30,000 e-mails at day, 60% of which
were spam," he said. "This was costing us 12 man-hours a day
managing spam and reducing false positives."
A six-month appraisal of nearly all the leading e-mail and web
security products produced similar functionality results, but
MailMarshal came in at one-quarter of the prices bid, he said. "We
had to sort out a few network problems at the start, but since then
it's been a 'fire and forget' solution."
Fred Olsen's network uses 256Kbyte satellite links to carry
voice, data and web traffic in a hub-and-spoke network between head
office and its fleet of five cruise ships. Each ship has its own
Exchange server and a Juniper
proxy server that also compresses traffic to make the most of the
limited bandwidth.
Traffic content includes both company confidential information
and passenger traffic from on-board internet cafes. "This makes
downtime very visible and critical for us," said Ericsson.
"Previously we were having outages that lasted from 30 minutes to a
day. Since the new appliance was installed, we've had no problems,
and the number of false positives has dropped from 40-50% to
2%."
This has also freed manpower that Ericsson is deploying
elsewhere in the IT department. The next big project is to relocate
the company's head office, which will see its entire network
infrastructure revamped. MailMarshal will still be part of it, said
Ericsson.