Prince William County Schools
Virginia's Prince william County School System Eliminates Unsolicited and Obscene Content From More Than 7,500 Email Inboxes Across 75 Schools
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Prince William County Schools (PWCS)
had to take immediate action to combat
its spam problem. The school system's
employees were being assaulted by an
increasing amount of obscene and unsolicited
email, as well as a large number of
viruses. PWCS installed an anti-spam appliance
to get rid of the obscene messages,
but it only worked with 50% effectiveness.
PWCS needed a better solution to its
spam problem.
PROOFPOINT SOLUTION
PWCS replaced its mediocre anti-spam
appliance with the Proofpoint P600 appliance.
The Proofpoint P600 protects PWCS
by eliminating spam, guarding against viruses
and ensuring that employees are not
sending inappropriate email outside the
network.
RESULTS ACHIEVED
The Proofpoint P600 provided amazing
results. The appliance worked with perfect
accuracy and within minutes of installation,
it stopped hundreds of spam messages
from reaching employee inboxes.
Employees quickly noticed they no longer
received any spam and applauded the IT
staff for eliminating the problem.
PRODUCTS DEPLOYED
The results were amazing. After a weekend of testing,my director asked me on Monday morning what we changed, because his inbox was suddenly free of spam.
Jim Hite,
Supervisor of Network Services and,
Central Operations for PWCS
PROTECTING TEACHERS AND ADMINISTRATORS FROM OFFENSIVE EMAIL PWCS is the third largest school system in Virginia and the 64th largest school system in
the nation, with more than 63,000 students and 7,500 teachers and administrators. The
school system spans 75 schools across Northern Virginia.
Over the past two years, employees received an exponentially increasing amount of unsolicited email in their inboxes – much of it filled with pornographic content. Employees grew increasingly dissatisfied with the email system because of these obscene emails and the enormous amount of time spent manually deleting messages.
The growing number of global virus attacks also threatened the school system's network and oftentimes brought network performance to a crawl. In fact, spam messages comprised 50% of PWCS' incoming email, while viruses comprised 21% of incoming email. Both the spam and viruses consumed disk space and wasted IT staff time, so PWCS had to take immediate action to conserve resources and save money.
IT administrators first installed another vendor's anti-spam appliance to stop the unsolicited emails, but it only worked with 50% effectiveness. With the volume of spam growing every day, it would only be a matter of months before the problem returned to levels prior to deployment of the appliance. Jim Hite, supervisor of network services and central operations for PWCS, looked into other options, heard good reviews about the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway and decided to test it out.
IMMEDIATE RESULTS FROM THE PROOFPOINT MESSAGING
SECURITY GATEWAY
Intelligent Decisions, one of the fastest growing systems integrators in the Washington,
D.C. metropolitan area, installed the Proofpoint P600 at PWCS to protect all teacher
and administrator inboxes. PWCS was blown away by the speed and effectiveness
of the Proofpoint appliance. The Proofpoint P600 went to work as soon as Intelligent
Decisions plugged it in.
“The results were amazing,” said Hite. “Two minutes after Intelligent Decisions installed the Proofpoint appliance, the P600 had effectively stopped 200 spam messages. After a weekend of testing, my director asked me on Monday morning what we changed, because his inbox was suddenly free of spam.”
The Proofpoint appliance eradicates spam by stopping it at the network gateway, before it can consume valuable bandwidth and computing resources. Proofpoint's MLX™ technology is based on machine learning and classifies email by examining more than 100,000 attributes in every message. Hite says the MLX technology provides the major advantage over competitive solutions.
“The Proofpoint MLX technology learns from experience and is constantly adapting to new threats, whereas our previous solution reacted slowly to new threats and required human intervention to detect new forms of spam,” said Hite. “Proofpoint automatically rids our network of obscene email and it requires nearly zero IT maintenance on our part. It allows us to focus our IT resources on other important areas.”
TOTAL MESSAGE PROTECTION IN ONE APPLIANCE
In addition to the spam detection module, PWCS is also using the virus detection and
content compliance features of the P600. The virus detection module provides PWCS
with enterprise-class anti-virus protection from McAfee. With the content compliance
module, PWCS is able to define its policies for outbound email—such as limiting attachment
types and scanning for certain keywords—and non-compliant email is flagged
and quarantined for review.
“As a school system, we don't want our employees sending out emails containing sensitive or inappropriate content, so the content compliance module allows us to flag outbound email if it contains questionable attachments or words,” said Hite.
Hite notes that with Proofpoint, faculty satisfaction has been greatly improved, as teachers and administrators never see obscene email in their inboxes. “We need to give our teachers the tools they need to be productive in the classroom,” said Hite. “Proofpoint enables them to use their email and network resources with much greater efficiency, so they can dedicate their time to better serving our students and providing them with the best education possible.”
ABOUT PWCS
Prince William County Schools is the third
largest school system in Virginia and the
64th largest school system in the nation,
with more than 63,000 students and 7,500
teachers and administrators. The school
system spans 75 schools across Northern
Virginia. The Prince William County School
System has a reputation for excellence in
education, with Newsweek ranking three
county high schools among the top 500
schools in the United States.
