Case Study - Bakers Delight
"Our business relies on email so much because we have
so many sites that we have to communicate with..." Peter Carrodus: Information Services Manager, Bakers Delight.
Challenge
Despite the server level
anti-virus protection already
in place Bakers Delight’s network fell victim to the
Bugbear Worm.
Solution
MailGuard's® outsourced anti-SPAM and anti-virus
solution to protect Bakers Delight's 225 plus email
users before potentially contaminated emails reach
their inboxes.
Benefits
- IT team able to protect fully the users within the network
and deliver a constant supply of legitimate email
- Users no longer experience the frustration of SPAM
clogging their inboxes
- IT team no longer faces congested networks from
large, uncontrolled attachments
- 24 x 7 fear of viral outbreak now not an issue
- Email policies, usage statistics and a more efficient
utilisation of data storage are key management
outcomes.
The Story
Despite deploying server-level anti-virus protection, in late 2003 Bakers Delight's head
office fell victim to the Bugbear Worm - a mass-mailing worm that quickly spreads via
email and shared network resources while attempting to disable various antivirus and
firewall programs.
Bakers Delight is Australasia's largest and oldest
bakery franchise, established in 1980 as a single
bakery in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn.
Its founders focus on outstanding product and
delightful customer service to meet their 30 year vision
to be the most successful retail baker in the world.
As a franchise bakery, Bakers Delight, sells 13.3%
of all bread retailed in Australia and 8.5% of all
bread sold in New Zealand.
The company has 225 email users dispersed
throughout its head office and regional offices,
servicing the needs of its six hundred plus franchisees.
Today, Bakers Delight uses MailGuard's outsourced
services to manage and filter all users' incoming and
outgoing email.
In late 2003, the severe impact of the Bugbear Worm
on Bakers Delight, despite the efforts of its in-house
IT department, led information services manager
Peter Carrodus to seriously consider outsourcing
the organisation's email filtering processes.
"As an IT department we're small. We're a multiskilled
group of people and we all have to lend a
hand in many different technical areas. Frankly, this
is not a particularly good model for security,"
Carrodus maintains.
Carrodus turned to MailGuard to protect the
company's 225 email users in Bakers Delight's head
and regional offices. After a 14 day trial, Bakers
Delight became MailGuard's 300th global customer.
"With virus scares monthly and SPAM on the increase,
I now have complete peace of mind that every single
user is comprehensively protected from viruses and
junk mail 24 hours a day. With MailGuard's security
and filtering systems automatically updated every
10 minutes, we have been virus and SPAM free since
adopting the service," said Carrodus
Carrodus believes email security is a very specialised
area that is costly to have in-house. "MailGuard's
service-based model works well for us, delivers
comprehensive filtering solutions and, in addition,
is actually saving Bakers Delight money in both
resources and productivity time," he says.
Carrodus is now looking to extend that protection
to its 600 franchise bakeries. "Our business relies on
email so much because we have so many sites that
we have to communicate with, both within our
regional offices and the bakeries," Carrodus says.
"Though our bakeries handle things well, at the end
of the day, they're in the business of making bread."
While virus protection has been Carrodus' numberone
priority, he says MailGuard's SPAM filtering
service has more of an impact on day-to-day activities.
"An incredible amount has been stopped and that
has certainly been well received by our user
population. From an IT point of view, we think it's
great because it's less garbage in our server logs
and less traffic we have to receive," said Carrodus.
Carrodus believes that, today, unwanted emails
(viruses, worms, SPAM, pornography, etc), and email
usage is a key concern within all organisations
whether there are two or 2,000 users.
MailGuard's solution has given Bakers Delight the
ability to filter certain types of email and flag these
for the attention of management. The outsourced
solution gives access to comprehensive statistics
and reports on customers' email traffic.
MailGuard clients need make no changes to their
email infrastructure. They need only request their
ISP to redirect their Domain Email Configuration
to MailGuard's servers, where email is scanned
and filtered before being delivered.
While MailGuard's users can customise and
closely monitor antivirus and SPAM filtering via
a management console, a third of clients never
log onto the console, reveals MailGuard director
Andrew Johnson.
"The common thread through our clients is they
don't have a lot of in-house technical skills, or the
technical skills they do have in-house are totally
focused on moving the business forward,"
Johnson says. "They do not see antivirus and email
filtering as something they want to
be spending hours on daily." |
