October 08, 2004
FrontBridge Hits A Home Run At Louisville Slugger
The company's spam problem had them ready to quit the e-mail game, but a managed e-mail service turned it around.
Louisville Slugger Knocks Spam Out of the Network with FrontBridge's TrueProtect Email Security Solution
The Company: Hillerich & Bradsby Co. Inc., a.k.a. Louisville Slugger
Surely you're familiar with Hillerich & Bradsby. You're not? Perhaps you know them by their more common name: Louisville Slugger. That's the brand name of baseball bat that Hillerich & Bradsby has been supplying to the world's greatest baseball players, as well as the world's most enthusiastic sand lotters, ever since 1884. Today the company claims that the Louisville Slugger is "The Official Bat Of Major League Baseball,' a claim that is backed up by the 60% of all major league players who swing the company's prime lumber from the batter's box.
But that's almost beside the point here. What is the point is that Louisville Slugger was so frustrated by spam that it was about to relieve its in-house e-mail service, and start using some sort of outside service. The overwhelming volume of hits from the spammers kept jamming up the company's network with their junk e-mail. The result was employees spending over an hour per day sorting through spam, and network overload that had the company's ISP screaming for the company to pay for more its bandwidth. And many employees had been restricted from using e-mail altogether.
You might not think that baseball bat people are into research, but making baseball bats is a a competitive industry and Louisville Slugger is constantly looking for lighter, stronger materials for their bats. They took the same approach to improving their e-mail situation, and set a goal of eliminating spam at employees' desktops without causing the sort disruption to employees that come with system changeovers.
Selecting A New E-Mail Batter
"Once we realized the impact spam was having on our network and users' productivity, it almost became a choice between an email security solution and getting rid of corporate email altogether," said Gary Ward, LAN/WAN manager. The company's IT department evaluated a variety of solutions from inexpensive to pricey, including software, hardware, and managed services approaches. They found many were difficult to load, hard to configure and didn't like them if they placed the responsibility to manage various black and white lists on the users.
About a year ago the company's IT researchers settled on FrontBridge's TrueProtect managed e-mail solution. They decided that its perimeter approach to fighting spam and viruses was a cost-effective, easy-to-implement and comprehensive enterprise email security solution that would not force them to change the basic way their employees sent and received e-mail and the way their servers processed it.
One incident during the research phase was key to that decision. Just after the first installation of TrueProtect, there was an immediate concern " the amount of email coming through was so dramatically reduced that the staff thought their email server wasn't working properly. But in fact, only good email was getting through and the message traffic volume was dramatically lower.
"75 percent of our email is spam," said Craig Burcham, a Louisville Slugger LAN/WAN technician. "In a typical month, our company gets hit with 250,000 email messages but only 60,000 of those are good email messages." The company's installation of TrueProtect has significantly reduced the amount of email-borne viruses the company receives. In one month the FrontBridge service stopped 7,000 viruses from having the chance to wreak havoc on our network."
Getting Bandwidth Back
Since FrontBridge is a managed service that stops spam before it even enters the network, Louisville Slugger has seen a noticeable improvement in the efficiency of its bandwidth utilization. "Without the FrontBridge service, we would have had to increase our bandwidth through our ISP and add more hardware and software to manage the network traffic volume," said Ward who added that the cost-benefit effect of the company's decision was pretty clear.
Louisville Slugger has seen a very low false positive rate with the FrontBridge system. "In the year that we've used FrontBridge we've only had one false positive and it turned out to be a policy violation from one of our employees," said Burcham. Because of its positive experience Louisville Slugger no longer has to limit email to certain key employees; they were able to roll it out company-wide.
FrontBridge's managed e-mail service has helped Louisville Slugger to keep its corporate email intact. In addition the service has enabled the company to expand the e-mail user base, increase employee productivity and slash IT maintenance costs associated with the explosion of legitimate email traffic.
Jesse Villa is technical product manager at FrontBridge.
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