Taiwan university ups email and web security

By EgovAsia Editors | Mar 17, 2010

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Following an extensive network security review at the National Open University (NOU) of Taiwan, Datacraft was commissioned to implement a high performance security solution for the university. The Datacraft solution is customixed to the campus’ unique network and will provide water-tight security against increasing amounts of spam and web-borne viruses; as well as new management tools for email content filter to improve usability and enable constant enhancements.

The NOU is a unique education establishment that offers distance learning programmes to students who wish to pursue a higher level of education. Students all over Taiwan can enroll for a wide range of courses that utilises a variety of study materials. These include offline textbooks and publications, and online tools such as TV and radio broadcasts, as well as audio and video contents. At peak times, email and web traffic rose drastically, which also led to increase in spam levels. The content filter solution used then was unable to cope with the high web traffic, and presented issues like maintenance costs too.

“There would be a huge spike in email and web traffic at start of school terms and whenever we held events,” said Evan Chen, IT Manager for NOU. “This seemed to result in an exponential increase in spam which clogged up our bandwidth and slowed down our entire network. This meant that course information was not getting through to our students, affecting their study patterns. We needed to find an effective solution that would solve both the mail spam issues and meet our requirements for email content filter.”

The Datacraft team recommended the Cisco IronPort C360 and Cisco IronPort S660. The former unit is a high performance spam filter for heavy email traffic, which incorporates an outbound mail filter that allows NOU to manage its own email security policy. IronPort C360 also provides better executive reports for NOU to continuously improve upon its email policy.

On the other hand, IronPort S660 provides powerful web security features to contend with the growing number of malevolent web-based attacks. The appliance leverages Cisco Security Intelligence Operations (SIO) and global threat correlation technology to help increase the intelligence and speed at which the latest internet threats are detected. With an easy-to-use content filter system and high performance guarantee, this solution addressed NOU’s requirements precisely.

“We recommended the Cisco IronPort solutions for their exceptional performance even during high traffic periods,” said Benjamin Wang, General Manager for Datacraft Taiwan. “It reduced the element of complexity in securing the university’s vast operations by consolidating the gateway, which made the entire security infrastructure easier to manage.”