The City of Airdrie is one of the fastest growing communities in Canada with 38,091 people located 10 minutes north of Calgary. With a wide range of housing options available in both new and established neighbourhoods, people are discovering that Airdrie offers a small town lifestyle with big city amenities.
A New Challenge
Paul Hurst of the City of Airdrie was aware the city’s existing anti-spam contract was coming up for renewal and he felt this would be the perfect opportunity to investigate new email security products. After experiencing a 75% decrease in the cost of web filtering with the Astaro Security Gateway web security subscription Hurst was sure to include the Astaro Security Gateway email security application on his list of products to evaluate.
Sticking with Astaro
After looking into email security products, Hurst decided to deploy an Astaro Security Gateway 320 with both web and email security applications. “The cost of implementing both subscriptions was comparable with renewing our existing anti-spam product; however the Astaro was a better choice for us as it offers more capabilities than other solutions.” These capabilities included the ability to expand to a high availability option, wireless implementation a unified frontend and administrative and detailed reporting.
More Success with Astaro
Before deploying the Astaro Security Gateway email security application the company lost approximately $14,000 in man hours in an 8 week period due to spam. With the Astaro in place the company is seeing a drastic reduction in the amount of time employees spend administering their inboxes and deleting spam, resulting in a 97% savings in man hours.
In addition to drastic reduction in spam, Hurst is also pleased with the reporting features the Astaro Security Gateway has to offer. “We can provide on-demand reporting for auditing purposes for inbound and outbound email, viruses infections prevented as well as reports in typical inbound email issues that went previously unknown” said Hurst. With the additional insight into his network activity Hurst is able to address issues before they become real problems. Email notifications for appliance errors, as well as daily, weekly and monthly reports are automatically distributed to internal IT staff so they can analyze network performance and make adjustments that will create an even more productive network environment.
Astaro in the Future
Now that the City of Airdrie is using the Astaro Security Gateway for both web and email security, Hurst is considering new ways of maximizing the appliances benefits. “We plan to take advantage of Astaro’s new Astaro Wireless Security product once the solution is available,” explained Hurst. “The product will allow us to provide seamless wireless access and solve many of our networking issues at the city’s offices.
