Educational System Cuts Spam, Millions in Costs, With Hosted E-Mail Filtering Solution

Overview

The Kentucky Department of Education manages the public educational system for the state's 174 school districts. An internal IT services group, the Office of Education Technology (OET), oversees the schools' Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 e-mail environment, which has more than 750,000 mailboxes. That environment was plagued with a growing spam problem, which slowed down the system and resulted in lost time and productivity for students, teachers, and IT administrators. To fix the problem, OET deployed a hosted spam-filtering solution from Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services. Since then, the department has seen improved protection against spam while realizing millions of dollars in savings related to e-mail management costs. The department's solution has also restored lost instructional and administrative time, and empowered individual school districts with better e-mail management tools.