Google Message Security Case Study

National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

Background

“We’re a non-profit and everyone has to wear 10,000 hats. With Google Message Security, we no longer have to wear the spam administrator hat.” Steven Gelfound Information Technology Director

The mission of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) is to help prevent child abduction and sexual exploitation; help find missing children; and assist victims of child abduction and sexual exploitation, their families, and the professionals who serve them. Located in Alexandria, Virginia, NCMEC was established in 1984 as a private, nonprofit organization to provide services nationwide for families and professionals in the prevention of abducted, endangered, and sexually exploited children. NCMEC has approximately 350 employees and an additional 50 to 100 law enforcement partners who use their network. NCMEC’s streamlined information technology (IT) staff includes six network administrators who are responsible for protecting the network from spam, viruses, and other threats. Challenge

ABOUT Google Apps Security and Compliance Google security and compliance products, powered by Postini, help you to protect and manage your existing email system. Built on a hosted service platform, these products block spam, phishing, malware and other intrusions before they reach your network, and provide content management and archiving to help you meet legal challenges. Google’s hosted model offers several distinct advantages. Leveraging the “network effect” of tens of thousands of email networks, Google technology detects new threats in real time and blocks them across the entire Google security network – without requiring on-site updates. Similarly, economies of scale in storage, simple deployment and maintenance-free service drive a low total cost of ownership.

By early 2006, NCMEC employees’ mailboxes had been overrun by spam. Typical employees were getting 20 spam emails a day, and some received more than 100 spam emails daily. An in-house anti-spam solution proved too burdensome to administer and was not effective in stopping new attacks before they infected one or more NCMEC computers. Furthermore, virus outbreaks were all too common and would require “all hands on deck” from IT. Spam and anti-virus had become a big distraction that were impeding the productivity of employees, especially those in IT. “Spam hits people’s inboxes and they instantly want someone’s help,” according to Troy Brown, NCMEC manager of network operations. “They don’t know if it’s spyware, malware, or what. So you have to stop what you’re doing and help with what’s usually a relatively minor thing.” With a limited operating budget, NCMEC could not afford a big expenditure to fix the problem. They needed a solution that was both cost-effective and capable of eliminating the spam and virus problems.

“With missing and exploited kids, it’s all about time. The faster we can get the word out about missing kids, the faster we can return them to their family.”

Solution For more information, visit www.google.com/a/security

NCMEC evaluated several different anti-spam products in the search for a way to greatly reduce spam without requiring too much time to administer. They could certainly not afford to dedicate a full-time resource to a technology that was not central to NCMEC’s mission. In April 2006, NCMEC implemented Google Message Security, powered by Postini. With the help of Google’s technical support, the new service was up and running in a matter of hours.

Google Message Security Case Study

“We’re a non-profit and everyone has to wear 10,000 hats,” says Steven Gelfound, information technology director at NCMEC. “With Google Message Security, we no longer have to wear the spam administrator hat.” Results The number of spam emails in employee mailboxes throughout the organization quickly went down to nothing. What’s more, since implementing Google Message Security, NCMEC has not had a virus outbreak – despite agency staff visiting a lot of dangerous websites in their quest to stop inappropriate online activity. No longer having to put all-hands on deck to clean up a virus outbreak has saved the IT team considerable time. IT gets far fewer emails from NCMEC employees unhappy with the volume of spam they receive. Network operations manager Brown estimates a time savings of at least 6-10 hours a week for the network administrators. NCMEC has also taken advantage of the Postini content filtering capability to block certain file types that NCMEC policies prohibit. By spending less time maintaining and managing servers, the NCMEC IT team can spend more time on security infrastructure and technology projects that are central to NCMEC’s mission, such as the rapid dissemination of missing children posters and forensic technologies. “With missing and exploited kids, it’s all about time,” says Gelfound. “The faster we can get the word out about missing kids, the faster we can return them to their family.”

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