Dublin, Ireland, Brennan Insurances, one of the oldest insurance brokers in Ireland, has installed Copperfastens Mail Firewall Appliance (MFA) in its Dublin offices with an immediate reduction in all spam by 99.999 percent. Prior to installation, the office servers were receiving between 2000 and 2500 spam mails per week with quite a few offensive in nature. Immediately, following installation of the MFA, this fell to on average to two or three single instances a week and these were mostly text based.

Pat Dent, Independent IT consultant with Brennans believes that the installation of the MFA will pay for itself within six months. We did some straightforward conservative number crunching based on the 83 staff and the amount of time required to process and delete spam on a daily basis. 83 staff times 3 minutes per day equates to 4 hours a day and averaging that time at ¬20 an hour equals ¬400 a week. It is just a sheer waste of company time and productivity and that is without even considering other critical issues such as IT risk, waste of data storage space or the potential legal and social implications of offending staff.

"Overnight we went from thousands of spam emails to practically none," says Dent.

"We evaluated a range of products on the marketplace, eliminating other vendor options on range of issues from scalability and price. The Copperfasten MFA met all our criteria, especially the ease of use and high spam hit rate. Also it added another level of virus e-mail checking. It is no good having a Spam solution if it is not easy to maintain and keep up to date," says Dent.

Installing the MFA was very straightforward and took about 20 minutes. As the MFA is an appliance as opposed to a software solution, this ensures no disruption of in-house servers and applications and eliminates the requirement to purchase new equipment. In addition the MFA checks for a number of updates, e.g. spam, antivirus, system updates, anywhere between one hour and one day. This reduces dependence on the need for IT staff to monitor and action updates as well as protecting the company; any firewall is only as good as its last update.

Dent has left no room for mistakes. In addition to the MFA, he also runs another appliance firewall with virus/spyware/intrusion detection scanning at the perimeter of the office network and Symantec AV and Microsoft Antispyware on each individual desktop.