Trinity College Dublin (TCD) has prevented 11.1 million spam emails from reaching its staff and student population of 20,000 within 20 days during a trial of a new email service.
Using Microsoft’s Exchanged Hosted Server (EHS), the 11.1 million spam emails accounted for 92pc of TCD’s overall email traffic of 12.1 million. Using their original email service, it was only capturing spam at an 80pc volume.
The college found that its traditional email service meant that it was taking up to a day for some messages to get through to the intended user.
After this trial was complete, TCD signed a deal under Microsoft’s Campus Licensing agreement, providing 100pc virus protection and a minimum of 95pc spam filtering.
The service level agreement (SLA) means that Microsoft have agreed to quarantine only 1 in 250,000 emails.
“Microsoft’s EHS couples effective email management with great value for money, it could end up being one of the best investments we’ve ever made,” said John Murphy, deputy director of IS Services at Trinity College Dublin.
The software-as-a-service (SAS) model means that no hardware or software needs to be installed, as this email service is managed over the web.
Although TCD recently signed a deal with Google to use Gmail as its student email system, making it the first college in Europe to do so, Microsoft’s EHS is platform independent and works with any email environment.
Jordi Munoz-Royo, security business manager for Microsoft EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), said of the EHS service: “Our advantage is the huge volume of email that we see, billions every month globally, giving us insight into how spam is behaving on a worldwide basis which differentiates us from our competitors.
“When we see a virus outbreak happening in the Far East we don’t need to wait until it reaches Europe. We can stop it before it reaches the rest of the world.”
By Marie Boran
