Webroot® Email Security Case Study
Everton Football Club
Everton Football Club Scores by Introducing Webroot® Email Security Service
Everton is a high profile brand, which means that it has a significantly higher proportion of inappropriate email than most businesses – indeed, only 1% of all inbound email traffic is legitimate mail.
Overview
Imagine your 200 employees receiving nearly one million emails a week, and only 1% being legitimate. This was what Steve Fell, Head of ICT for Everton Football Club faced before he moved to a web-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) email security system.
Business Drivers
Where They Gained
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Being a Premier League club and a household name, Everton Football Club is a prime target for marketing pitches and other sorts of unsolicited, bogus emails.
"We're an easy target as we're a well known brand," said Steve Fell. "And with football being football, you get a lot of people wanting to take advantage of associating their name with ours. In the last 28 days we've had 3.6 million emails and the percentage that are genuine is frightening – only around 1%."
Prior to moving to a Software as a Service (SaaS) email solution the IT department used to rent server space that was managed remotely by their supplier.
"The amount of hardware we needed kept growing and that was costing us money, yet the system still wasn't coping," says Fell. "In fact if we still managed our email security that way,
we'd now need up to four servers to handle the volume of email we're receiving."Everton was also anxious to prevent its brand from being associated with anything disreputable in terms of email communications and to ensure confidential information wasn't leaked. Another consideration on the agenda was securing the network from malware infection via email.
The Solution
For Everton, finding the right email filtering system took some time. They did online research, spoke to network suppliers and checked customer references and did price comparison. Eventually, it was talking to other football clubs that swayed Fell towards Webroot.
"We are very close as a community so when we are looking for new software we generally go to a forum and discuss with our peers what they are using," Fell explains. "Frequently I heard from other clubs that Webroot is a market leader. And speaking to more than one of our suppliers, the Webroot SaaS products always came out at the top of their recommendations."
So Fell signed up to use Webroot Email Security Service to protect the club's email users with anti-virus scanning and image filtering.
Faster, Dependable Email Delivery
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"Frequently, I heard that Webroot is a market leader."
-Steve Fell |
Everton had a seamless switchover that only took 30 minutes, and have been problem-free since. Email delivery is speedier and more secure since going through Webroot's servers and there are no longer bounce-backs from sent emails.
"Previously we had a problem with routing on some emails where certain companies' communication wouldn't get through – and if they are for the chairman, that clearly isn't good!" exclaimed Fell. Using Webroot fixed this and also reduced the strain on our mail server. Now it only has to point mail at one gateway so all the email queues have disappeared."
For Everton, email is especially important for communication with players and agents."Webroot is a definite bonus during the player transfer season when most of the deals are on the last minute and panic stations if an email can't get through," Fell says.
Regaining Hours of the Working Week
The spam issue and false positives on legitimate emails that Everton used to deal with every day have gone away.
"Webroot takes a lot of pressure off our network as the bad stuff is being filtered before it even hits us, so our people only ever see genuine email." Fell says. Because so much legitimate mail used to get blocked I had someone checking the old system every morning, afternoon and evening which was taking at least an hour and a half every day, seven days a week. There's none of that now."
Supporting Customer Relations
Every department has benefitted from only getting legitimate email, but they aren't the only ones. Customer relations are better, too.
"We get lots of emails requesting tickets for football games, so if any of those get blocked, like they used to, we'd be looking at possible lost revenue," Fell says. Customer service is paramount and now we are confident that we capture every customer inquiry."
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"If legitimate emails continued to be blocked, like they used to be, we’d be looking at possible loss of revenue. Now we are confident that we capture every customer enquiry."
-Steve Fell |
Webroot has helped Everton make a difference in countering the malware threat using a belt and braces strategy. Webroot Email Security Service filters and blocks viruses, with advanced techniques that ensure the lowest possible rate of false positives. All Everton's workstations and servers have anti-virus software installed as a second line of defence to the filtering done off-site.
Fell finds that managing the system is much easier now.
"The administration of the new system is so simple and quick compared to our old one," he says. "I went in recently and pulled off what I needed, no problem. It's great to have the time back and a network that's freed up for what we want to do."
Technical support has been good too, although Everton rarely has to use it.
"You get a response quickly and usually resolution within 4 hours, which is brilliant," explains Dave Sumner, Everton's IT Systems Analyst.
Fell is happy with the cost compared to what he might have had to budget for.
"If we tried to manage our email internally the cost of hardware would have risen dramatically as we'd need an additional 3–4 servers at around £6,000 each! But it's not just the cost of the computers, it's the software, extra licensing on the mail server and Windows, plus we'd need a mail administrator full time and would have to increase our bandwidth dramatically too."
Protecting Against Information Loss
Going forward, to help further with data and brand protection, Fell and his team are introducing deep content scanning of mail -- another element of the Webroot Service. It will enable them to quarantine any incoming and outgoing email containing profanity or potentially litigious content: "which doesn't give a good impression and we don't want Everton associated with it."
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