NCP

Industry: Transportation

Location: United Kingdom

Products Used: Hosted Email Security

NCP NCP Eliminates Spam and Secures Email “in the Cloud” With Websense^®

Founded in 1931, NCP is the U.K.’s market leader in the provision of parking services. Supplying over 200,000 parking spaces across more than 700 locations, the familiar yellow signage of NCP at car parks has become synonymous with parking in town centres, airports, and railway stations all over the United Kingdom.

The Problem

With three IT staff supporting NCP’s 550 IT users, managing increasing amounts of spam was becoming a burden. Although NCP had an on-network email security solution in place, they were continuing to struggle with spam, false positives and latency in the system, which resulted in legitimate emails being delayed.

“Managing email security in-house was difficult and time-consuming,” says Martin Law, head of IT, NCP. “Our domains receive something like 40,000 emails a day of which somewhere between 80-90 percent is spam. Even with an on-network solution we weren’t coping; the amount of incoming spam was impacting network bandwidth and inconveniencing our users.”

With limited resources to manage the situation, NCP took the decision to switch to a hosted service.

The Solution

NCP chose Websense^® Hosted Email Security. The solution has been in place for three years and NCP is more than satisfied with the decision to move to a hosted service.

“We are a small IT department so anything that we can outsource makes life a lot easier,” says Law. “Websense Hosted Email Security was attractive because it took away the overhead of managing our email security and delivered more than we expected in terms of resilience and ease-of-use. Overall, Websense Hosted Email Security has enabled us to deliver a more resilient, professional and cost-effective service to our users.”

Websense Hosted Email Security eliminates spam and malware before they reach the company network. The hosted deployment model provides centralized security with built-in redundancy, failover and business continuity while easing administration and optimising network operating and capacity planning costs. Guaranteed by industry-leading service level agreements, Websense Hosted Email Security provides the highest possible degree of protection.

NCP was particularly impressed with the speed at which Websense Hosted Email Security processed incoming Emails.

“Previously we had an issue with latency,” says Law. “Email was delayed which was not only inconvenient but reducing our own service levels. Websense quotes less than a second to process emails end-to-end so there is no issue of having to wait 15 minutes or more to have an email come through.”

NCP was also impressed that the Websense hosted solution was cheaper than an in-house solution.

“The hosted market has moved on in recent years,” says Law. “It is certainly cost-effective plus it is significantly more reliable and resilient that we could ever achieve internally without spending hundreds of thousands of pounds.”

The Importance of Keeping Email Secure

As blended email and Web threats continue to become more sophisticated, protecting end-users from attack becomes more difficult.

“The majority of business processes today are email dependent so maintaining asecure and highly reliable email service is important,” says Law. “Websense Hosted Email Security protects our network from dangerous spam without impacting the productivity of our users.”

Utilising the Websense ThreatSeeker^® Network, Websense Hosted Email Security protects organisations from spam, Web 2.0 threats, and the converged security threats found in more than 90 percent of unwanted mail.

The Websense ThreatSeeker Network uses more than 50 million real-time data collecting systems that continuously monitor Internet content — including new and dynamic content — for emerging threats. As a result, Websense is able to adapt to the rapidly changing Internet at speeds not possible by traditional security and basic email filtering solutions.

The Results

Websense Hosted Email Security has greatly improved email security at NCP and lifted the management burden from the IT department.

Eliminated spam

Eased administrative overhead

“Websense Email Security runs itself,” says Law. “When we managed our email security in-house it was almost a full time operation for one of our staff to keep the whole thing going – applying patches, updates and the like. Now, we don’t have to worry about it. It’s also cost-effective. Even today, if we were to do the same thing internally, we’d need to use a number of different products to guarantee the same results.”

Increased resilience, reduced cost

“Websense Hosted Email Security works; it’s extremely cost-effective and requires no support whatsoever,” concludes Law. “In fact, if we were to try and manage email security in-house again, at the same level of resilience, it would be more expensive. We are very pleased with Websense and would recommend their Hosted Email Security to other organisations.”

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