Central email lifecycle management for more efficiency

About the Client

Our Customer is an internationally recognized manufacturer of shoes and accessories, founded and based in Germany. The company produces tens of thousands shoes daily and sells its collections worldwide. To market the great variety of shoe models offered each season, our customer works closely with several thousand domestic and international sales partners communicating intensively by email.

Business Challenge

The IT and network administrator of our customer knows where the shoe pinches. The ever-increasing flood of email forced him to quick actions. More and more advertising email burdened the mail server. Some employees had to deal with spam comprising over 90 % of emails leading to high loss of work time and thereby becoming a cost factor for the company. In addition, the sales partners requested that communication in general be via email rather than via postal service. It was essential to encrypt confidential information such as bids or invoices in emails to protect against unwanted readers.

Up to this moment, the email encryption had been client based, which was complicated. Therefore, the encryption at individual workstations was administrator and user unfriendly since it was too complex and cost intensive e.g. for key administration for the client. In addition, the risk existed that individual users might mistakenly send confidential, unencrypted emails е.g. when resending older emails. The company was looking for a software solution for encoding and spam filtering that could cover the company guidelines as well as the requirements of administrator and users in addition to those of the sales partners.

Solution

Following the evaluation of different email systems, our customer decided upon BULPROS’s modular and rule based solution iQ.Suite for Microsoft Exchange. The significant advantage of the solution was that it is server based. This ensures that incoming emails are first decrypted, then tested for viruses and content, and afterwards archived and delivered without user intervention. The process is reversed for outgoing emails: first, testing for viruses and content on the server, then archiving and encoding. In this way, all important security checks could be accomplished with little effort even before the email left the company or alternatively reached the receiver.

Another reason for the customer to adopt iQ.Suite was the company-wide scalability of the solution and the flexible upgrading all the way to the realization of a continuous and integrated Email Lifecycle Management (ELM). In addition to encryption and anti-spam, this encompasses email classification and compliance as well as email archiving.

The paths of the emails were short due to the integrated modules. Moreover, the solution was easily integrated into existing IT structures with excellent performance and remained stable even with extremely heavy email use.

The IT and network administrator introduced the email encryption to the company at the request of domestic and international sales partners. Certain information such as calculations or invoices had to be accessible only to the recipient of the message and be protected from viewing. This requirement was quickly fulfilled using the module “iQ.Suite Crypt” for server-based en/decryption. The company-wide encryption guidelines could be centrally and flexibly configured.

Now only a key needs to be stored centrally on the server for each encryption process used. In this way, the receiver of the email easily receives the public key and the communication partners can exchange encrypted emails including attachments. The emails are signed for increased security ensuring authenticity and integrity of the email.

To test encrypted emails for viruses, emails are first decrypted using iQ.Suite on the server and then analyzed by Malware. The first scan for viruses exposes any possible false keys. Only then, the email is decrypted and scanned for viruses a second time ensuring “clean” emails in the in-box.

Most convincing was the anti-spam module “iQ.Suite Wall” with its consistent management console for the simple processing of unwanted messages, the unerring content analysis of emails and the message summary function. In addition, the users receive regular messages regarding newly filtered emails located in “suspected spam”, which the user can then forward into his/her inbox. To minimize the amount of administration, the administrator can allocate incoming emails to whitelists and blacklists containing sender addresses that are allowed and not allowed respectively. Thus, e.g. desired and not desired newsletters can be easily differentiated.

The effect of the spam filter can be significantly increased through content analysis of emails. The CORE technology (Content Recognition Engine) integrated in “iQ.Suite Wall” analyses both the subject line and the content of the email including the attachments according to company guidelines reaching spam recognition rates of over 98 percent. False positives are almost negligible using this email filter.

Value Delivered

According to the administrator, the automatic content analysis of messages and attachments using the spam filter showed a quick effect and therefore the goal to limit email communication to business-only was quickly reached. The combination of encryption and content analysis ensured data security and integrity as well as compliance with legal data protection regulations. In addition, the company was protected against industrial espionage. The encryption of messages ran in the background on the server to the satisfaction of domestic and international partners and company users. The installation and initial configuration of iQ.Suite was completed within a few hours.

The Future

In order to round out the existing email infrastructure our customer is planning to introduce an additional virus scanner, which will be addressed via iQ.Suite. In addition to the trusted emails, the company also intends to sign the associated in voices digitally.

The administrator highly appreciates the fact that the increase in security and efficiency gained with iQ.Suite had not required a large investment in encryption infrastructure setup and maintenance. Software distribution and user training completely dropped out as tasks. The combined encryption and spam/virus protection guarantees a secure and integrated email business process, improved customer service and higher productivity.