Network security deployment

Tourism Australia has deployed several appliances to protect itself from spam, viruses and malware. This deployment has allowed the company to improve its levels of service to its mailbox users in Australia and at 14 offices overseas.

The organisation is the Commonwealth Government Statutory Authority responsible for international and domestic tourism marketing, as well as the delivery of research and forecasting for the industry. The authority brings together the collective skills and knowledge of the former separate organisations — the Australian Tourist Commission, See Australia, the Bureau of Tourism Research and the Tourism Forecasting Council.

The organisation deployed security appliances from IronPort to provide effective email threat prevention, groupware protection and policy enforcement.

Tourism Australia’s chief technology officer, Roberto Martinelli, says the appliances have delivered an immediate positive impact on the organisation.

“Previously, with all our worldwide traffic passing through Sydney, whether inbound or outbound, we needed to maintain a help service purely for email- and web-related matters,” he explains.

“We were typically seeing 8000 to 10,000 emails a day, of which 80 to 90% were either spam or suspected of being virus-infected. This situation posed a real challenge for our people all over the world and the email ‘baby-sitting’ load we had to endure took the equivalent of one full-time person.”

Thanks to the new system, that drain on the organisation’s resources has “gone away”, according to Martinelli.

Prior to the new system, Tourism Australia dedicated resources to tracking email volumes and types for market research purposes.

“Now, however, we no longer find it necessary to do that,” Martinelli says. He estimates the new system blocks more than 99% of unnecessary traffic — and that the organisation’s staff are more productive as a result.