Webroot® Email and Web Security Case Study
Sunco Cabinets
Sunco Cabinets Unifies Email and Web Security with Webroot
Sunco Cabinets, known as one of the premier manufacturers of wood cabinetry for the home, has been in business for over twenty five years. As a small business, many employees wear more than one hat, including Scott Olsson, who is both head of IT and finance. Olsson is responsible for not only managing the company's finances, but also for ensuring that Sunco is protected from all computer threats including viruses, malware and spam.
The Problem
|
"Webroot Email Security is a
great product—it drastically
reduced a lot of expense for us
as well as resource allocation in
the mail system, too. The service
stops viruses before they even
reach us and has blocked over
50 million spam messages. In
today's world, email is a critical
business application, and the
inability to send and receive
email for any length of time is
a major problem. The Webroot
Business Continuity feature
stores up to 28 days of mail for
us and has us covered for any
server downtime."
-Scott Olsson |
Sunco ran all of its email through its own server, and utilized its own serverbased applications to scan email traffic for spam and viruses which caused a number of problems. Increasing numbers of spam messages caused a severe performance drain on the server and as a result mobile users had difficulty accessing their accounts. Sometimes the whole system crashed due to the spam overload. The company also had a strict Internet use policy that was clear on paper—but difficult to enforce. Violators had to be caught in the act, and with Olsson acting as the entire IT department, that was a challenge.
"At a large company, IT security is a full-time job for a whole team of people, and sometimes even they can't keep up with the constantly changing threats," Olsson says. "The job of IT Manager was added to my duties about 12 years ago. Since then, it has been a challenge to keep up with the constant evolution of threats and technologies available in order to provide the kind of security that we need, especially since I am an IT department of one, with some help from outside consultants."
For years Sunco had been using Webroot® AntiSpyware Corporate Edition with AntiVirus to protect its desktops against malware. The solution proved to be highly effective at blocking viruses and spyware, but as the online threat environment evolved over time, endpoint protection alone was not enough. Sunco needed a more robust, multi-layered solution.
"The desktop solution worked great, but it couldn't do it all," Olsson says. "We were protected against viruses and spyware, but then spam became an issue. Mobile user access became an issue, Internet misuse became an issue. I needed something that would still offer me great malware protection, but that would do all these other things, too."
The Solution
Olsson was researching several solutions when he received an email from Webroot that featured the benefits of Webroot Email Security SaaS. Since he had found Webroot's desktop protection effective and easy to use, Olsson was intrigued to see what additional features Webroot's Email SaaS services could offer over the other solutions being evaluated. "I decided to give it a shot, and signed up for the free two-week trial," Olsson says. "It worked well, was easy to use and was going to save us several thousand dollars a year. It also meant that I didn't have to spend my time constantly updating in-house software and doing maintenance to stay ahead of threats. Webroot Email Security SaaS is always on and up-to-date with the current threats."
After being a Webroot Email Security customer for about a year, Olsson received an email from Webroot that featured the benefits of Webroot Web Security SaaS. Having found the Email Security solution to be so successful—he felt the new Web Security service might be the answer to simplify enforcement of Sunco's Internet use policy and protect against emerging web-based threats. Again he signed up for the free trial. Like with the Email service, he found the Web Security service to be just as easy to use and maintain.
The Benefits
Since implementing Web on top of email protection, Olsson reaps the benefits daily. Before Webroot Security services were implemented, Sunco was experiencing hundreds of thousands of spam emails a day, peaking some days at one million. Since implementing Webroot Email Security, there has been a 30 – 40% boost in email server performance and a 98% decrease in spam.
"Webroot Email Security is a great product—it drastically reduced a lot of expense for us as well as resource allocation in the mail system, too," Olsson says. "The service stops viruses before they even reach us and it has blocked over 50 million spam messages. We also have the Business Continuity option, which means that in the event of a mail server failure here at the office, our employees can access their email via a Webroot secure webmail portal and still be able to send and receive mail until the mail server is back online. In today's world, email is a critical business application, and the inability to send and receive email for any length of time is a major problem. The Webroot Business Continuity feature stores up to 28 days of mail for us and has us covered for any server downtime."
Olsson finds that Webroot Web Security makes it much easier to manage employee computer use and enforce company policies. He especially likes the flexible management console which provides real-time summaries of Web traffic by category as well as time spent on the most popular Web sites.
As administrator, Olsson likes the fact that he can change which sites are restricted or allowed with just a click of a button. He began by having coached access instead of blocking all of the sites, so that the employees would know what was restricted and what was not. The coached access feature gives administrators the ability to slowly ease into restrictions. When a visitor searches or tries to access one of the sites on the coached list, instead a page opens that tells them that access is allowed for now, but that this site is on the restricted list. Eventually, Olsson moved to blocking sites defined as inappropriate under Sunco's Internet usage policy.
Blocking inappropriate sites isn't the only benefit of Web Security. Olsson also likes how proactive it is in blocking phishing sites.
"Webroot Web Security does a great job of protecting against a site that might be hiding malicious threats," Olsson says. "Today, it's a lot harder to just look at something and know if it's a scam, even if you're educated about it—you sometimes can't tell if it's a legitimate link or not, and sometimes even legitimate sites can have infected links; in fact, a lot of infections today come from legitimate sites. Webroot protects against those threats and alerts you before you become the victim of a drive-by download or some other malware."
With the addition of Webroot Email and Web Security to its endpoint protection, Sunco's employees are completely covered—no matter where they are. The company now has comprehensive coverage against computer threats on the desktop and in the cloud. Whenever a security question arises, Olsson can make one phone call to a centralized support line to get the answers he needs. With the help of Webroot, Olsson is no longer a team of one and Sunco gets thorough protection at a fraction of the cost and time.
For more Webroot case studies, visit www.webroot.com/business
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