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Contents 
Introduction
A changing market
The appliance-making appliance
Do they really scale?
The ease-of-use myth
Walking the appliance road
Taking a holiday from spam
What about the disks? |
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Tourism Australia had a problem. The volume of spam sent to its 400+ e-mail addresses was so high that it was becoming increasingly difficult for its staff to plough their way through their day's messages. Yet the company's experiences with automated spam control software resulted in unacceptable numbers of false positives being deleted before they reached the intended recipient.
"We used to have a dedicated person to read the subject line and header of every e-mail to see if they should come through," says the organisation's chief technology officer Roberto Martinelli.
Martinelli says this was an expense that he recognised was not sustainable in the long term -- it was this that led to him making the decision to investigate using IronPort e-mail monitoring appliance for the job.
"We did a pilot and it was as simple as advertised," he says. "The success rate has been 99.5 percent for spam and antivirus and the false positive rate was much lower: just what we wanted."
The organisation now operates one appliance alongside its single e-mail gateway, and despite the fact it operates several offices Martinelli finds it more effective to operate a single gateway than to arrange and maintain remote deployments.
"If our network configuration was distributed e-mail servers, the appliance configuration would be different. But the setup of our organisation suits IronPort."
While the person employed to monitor e-mail is no longer required, the appliance is not entirely maintenance free.
Overall, however, the organisation's experience has been very positive and Martinelli is now considering other appliances.
"When I started reading all the documentation they provided for me I said 'yeah, I have seen this all before' but we have resources to manage -- this is where an appliance becomes very attractive. This is our first appliance but it probably won't be our last because so far it has proven very easy to use."
