When Glenview, IL-based Illinois
Tool Works (ITW), a Fortune 200 diversified manufacturer, decided to
implement an enterprisewide virtual private network (VPN) for its more than 600
business units around the world, it realized that there was a gaping hole in its
secure environment. With over 52,000 employees operating in 43 countries, the
$9.3 billion company prided itself in the autonomy it afforded its decentralized
business units. But this autonomy was about to come back and bite the company.
What executives soon discovered was that it was pretty self-defeating if—having
gone to all the trouble of installing a highly secure VPN—the company left the
backdoor open by allowing third-party providers to host its enterprise e-mail
services.“Some of our larger units had their own messaging platforms—like a Lotus Notes or an Exchange server,” explained Marc Palano, IT director for ITW. “That was fine with us. But there were also many units using third-party companies to host their mail or provide them e-mail services.” The challenge for ITW was to figure out how to secure this diversified messaging environment over the company’s VPN when the messages weren’t originating on the internal platform.
After investigating its options, ITW concluded that it would install its own dedicated message hosting system at corporate headquarters. This would give its business units an in-house alternative that they could secure over the company’s VPN. Now the trick was to choose a platform that could accommodate the spectrum of sophisticated technology among its business units. “We realized very quickly that some units are moving to wireless mobility, deskless workers, and sales forces,” says Palano. “So we had to have a solution that appealed to a wide variety of units, or it wouldn’t have been a success.”
Mirapoint beats Microsoft Exchange cost of ownership 3 to 1
The search for the right messaging platform quickly narrowed to two: the Message Server M4000 from Sunnyvale, CA-based Mirapoint and Microsoft Exchange. Though corporate headquarters was already using Microsoft Exchange, the cost of ownership for all the features ITW wanted to include in its platform—virus scanning, spam filtering, etc.—was three times higher than it would be with the all-inclusive Mirapoint platform. “We went through all the licensing costs for each option and, basically, the per-user cost was about $4 a month for Mirapoint vs. between $12 and $13 a month for Exchange,” reports Palano. As adoption of the Mirapoint platform spreads throughout ITW’s enterprise, this cost difference could potentially exceed $5 million a year.
Centralized platform offers autonomy without compromising security
In addition to lowering costs, maintaining business unit autonomy was another important factor in choosing the Mirapoint solution. According to Palano, the system easily hosts multiple domains, while allowing system administrators of each business unit to manage their own domain. “The Mirapoint system satisfies our need for security while still giving our business units a sense of independence, which ITW doesn’t want to lose,” says Palano.
Mirapoint lets users define spam for themselves
Another valuable feature of the Mirapoint platform was the MD400 Message Director. This tool allows corporate headquarters to scan e-mails for viruses and filter for spam and content before disseminating e-mails over the VPN to the designated business units. “Spam is costing our business units a lot of time,” says Palano. “Thousands of users spend half their day sorting through junk e-mail.” By putting the spam filtering in at the message director level, Palano estimates that ITW reduces spam by at least 90 percent before users even see the mail.
In keeping with its philosophy of autonomy—and understanding that one man’s junk mail is another man’s treasure—ITW also lets individual users set up their own white and black lists to control the flow of messages to their mailboxes. Palano reports that users appreciate the individualization and are finding the instances of false positive spam identification very infrequent with the Mirapoint system.
Jeff Brainard, product marketing manager for Mirapoint, credits the successful screening to the superior design of the platform’s anti-spam features, a mixture of content filtering and smart heuristic rules. Not only does Mirapoint’s message director analyze words and word patterns in a message, it looks for significant combinations like the word “unsubscribe” at the end of an e-mail combined with the use of capital words and HTML attachments. “Companies don’t want to have a riot on their hands when users start finding that some of their important personal or marketing-type mail is being filtered out as spam,” says Brainard. “So Mirapoint provides a way to let users self-manage what they’re getting as junk mail.”
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