Astaro all-in-one security appliances safeguard the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh IT infrastructure

(29/06/2009)

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE) is a professional membership organisation representing over 10,000 medical professionals worldwide, and uses email as a core communication channel with members. The College had relied on its ISP to manage its anti-spam and anti-virus solutions but found that the security system in place was also impacting the delivery of legitimate traffic.

Astaro has announced that the RCPE has implemented Astaro’s all-in-one security appliances to safeguard the College’s IT infrastructure and significantly reduce the time spent by the IT team on email management.

Using the Astaro Security Gateway appliances, the College now has the ability to easily manage its anti-spam and anti-virus services in-house and has established a finely tuned system for identifying email security threats.

“Previously, we were seeing too many false positives in our spam, where legitimate email traffic would not get through. The filters would be sent over to the IT team, where we would have to wade through to find any legitimate emails, which took up a lot of our resources. With Astaro, the number of false positives has been reduced to almost zero, while individual users can now check their own spam email lists as well. We estimate that we have reduced the amount of time spent on managing spam by around 95 percent, which removes a significant burden from the IT team. We also have greater control over the security set-up if we require it,” explained Inez Hyde, IT Manager at the RCPE.

The two Astaro ASG 220 UTM appliances also replace the College’s previous Novell BorderManager firewall, which was approaching its end of life date. Hyde added, “We decided to look at alternatives to the Novell product that could provide the College with a cost-effective, more comprehensive security platform and that would be easy to manage in the longer term. Working with our IT partner NDS8, the Astaro UTM appliances were deployed quickly and provide us with all that we need to keep the College secure. Overall, we are extremely happy with the Astaro solution.”

Andrew Fourie, sales director UK and Ireland for Astaro, commented, “Making sure that an organisation’s IT is secure and able to support business priorities these days requires a multi-faceted approach to keep up with the speed at which new threats and attacks are developed. Astaro’s approach is based on taking the difficulty out of security, making it easier to manage while retaining the flexibility and depth of functionality that they need to be secure both now and in the future.”

“The Astaro appliances are an ideal solution for businesses that want a manageable and easy to deploy solution that gives full protection over their IT assets and Internet systems. With Astaro remote management capabilities we were able to deliver set-up and support services remotely as part of the installation,” commented Tim Heywood, director at NDS8.

The Astaro appliances provide RCPE with an expanded range of security functionality, from a stateful inspection firewall and intrusion prevention through to integrated anti-virus, anti-spam and web filtering / proxy services. The two appliances run in active/passive mode to provide high availability and protection against failure.

Related topics:  Firewall   Hacking and intrusion prevention   Internet and Web security   Network Security   Virus, Worm, Email security, spyware and malware 

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