California County Ramps Up IT Security
Secure Computing Corp., an enterprise gateway security company, recently announced that Orange County, Calif., has protected its IT network with a unified set of Secure Computing products, including Secure Firewall, Secure Mail and Secure Web.
Addressing multiple threat vectors, the complete Secure Computing solution incorporated anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-malware, e-mail filtering and encryption, data protection, Web filtering, intrusion prevention and protection from blended attacks.
In addition, thanks to Secure Computing's Unified Threat Management (UTM) approach, the county government has been able to achieve enterprise-class security while keeping management overhead to a minimum.
Orange County IT executives report that the new security has significantly improved productivity.
“Secure Computing’s line of fully integrated solutions protects the County of Orange from both internal and external dangers, allowing my staff to focus on managing security instead of constantly reacting to threats,” said Tony Lucich, CISO for the Orange County Office of Information Technology.
Like many government organizations, the Orange County network houses a large amount of sensitive data that requires the high levels of protection.
According to Lucich, the county selected Secure Computing because it combines multiple best-of-breed security protections into "all-in-one" appliances.
“We didn’t want to have to deal with managing multiple boxes strung together,” Lucich said. “We needed a big picture solution to deal with the large increase we’ve seen in threats like spam and viruses.”
Spam accounts for 97 percent of all e-mail threatening to enter Orange County’s network. In order to block that unwanted email, the county relies on Secure Computing's TrustedSource reputation-based security system, which gathers historical and real-time global intelligence in order to provide pro-active threat blocking.
“Based on our own first-hand experience, companies that integrate the TrustedSource module into their existing load balancers, firewalls or other technologies are going to see a vast improvement in their spam filtering,” Lucich said. “This technology, along with Secure Mail, allows us to save thousands of dollars every day in lower email administration costs, dramatically reduces the need to buy additional servers to process increased mail volumes and, perhaps most importantly, saves us an estimated $42,000 a day in employee productivity that would otherwise be lost to dealing with spam.”