Case Study: Minneapolis Public Schools
Situation
Minneapolis Public Schools serves nearly 48,000 students in some 128 locations. The organization has an annual budget of more than $600 million, and they are the 13th largest employer in the State of Minnesota. Over 8,000 employees work there, who are all dedicated to serving Minneapolis children and families. Over the past 18 months, the school system was seeing a dramatic increase in the amount of spam traffic and the type of spam was also becoming much more adult content in nature. Being in the education industry, Minneapolis Public Schools was hard-pressed for a solution -- fast. They had 10,000 email users to consider, many of which belonged to teachers and students.
Doug Roberts, Senior Internet Engineer, of Minneapolis Public Schools, had two choices: Do it in-house or seek a third-party. "We thought long and hard about doing it internally," he said. "You know, beefing up the firewall or setting up rules on the mail server. But the on-going maintenance was a real concern. We just didn't have the time."
Solution
Minneapolis Public Schools selected Securence. "They couldn't have come at a better time, and they brought us a deal that we couldn't turn down." Roberts cited that the setup and the maintenance were "turn-key and worry-free."
Once the anti-spam service was deployed, immediate relief was seen on their mail servers as well as a dramatic reduction in unsolicited emails. What's more, according to Roberts, he was amazed at how much spam and virus mail they had been receiving. "Unbelievable!" he exclaimed. "I thought we were receiving about 40 to 50 percent, but found out it was more in the 70 to 80 percent range. I was blown away at this number."
Overall value of the Securence solution was its accuracy, low monthly cost, ease of deployment, significantly reduced workload on computer support, minimal on-going administration, and heightened security leading to improved morale among email users.
"Securence has been a real blessing to me, and we've been really happy with it," said Roberts. "Calls are way down. And as they say, no news is good news."
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