Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker Frees Up Hours and Inboxes for Small Businesses

Customer Case Study
Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker Frees Up Hours and Inboxes for Small Businesses
Confronting a Growing Mountain of Spam Spam email continues to be a big problem, especially for small businesses. Small companies rely on email just as much as large enterprises, and their mail servers get clogged with unsolicited mail just as often. But, with fewer resources to spare to address the spam problem, small businesses need smarter solutions.
Unfortunately, the options that traditionally have been available to small businesses, such as anti-spam appliances and services, have been less than perfect solutions. Miocon Networks, for example, a small technology integrator in Louisville, Kentucky, relied on a third-party email filtering service to reduce spam, but the service carried a high recurring cost. Miocon's leaders were also uncomfortable with the lack of visibility and control over their email.
"We're getting involved with a lot of security-based projects, and we didn't like having our non-encrypted mail traffic going out to a hosted provider," says Michael O'Coners, owner of Miocon. "Having our email passing through a third party was never satisfactory for us."
LUNAR, a product development consulting firm with offices in California, Europe, and Hong Kong had a major spam problem despite having just 50 employees.
"In the past, we have received as many as 160,000 spam messages in a day," says Dick Taylor, the company's systems administrator. "As much as 98 percent of the mail coming into our business is spam."
LUNAR had purchased a small-business anti-spam appliance, but the solution required a significant amount of ongoing time and attention. "I had to work very hard to keep that appliance working right," says Taylor. "Training the system to understand what was legitimate mail and what was spam was an ongoing effort. I used to spend anywhere from three to five hours a week working with it."
Even then, some spam continued to get through. Worse yet, the appliance occasionally misidentified valid email and blocked it. Some employees even demanded that Taylor remove filtering from their mailboxes to make sure that they didn't miss any messages from customers. The anti-spam solution also affected the performance of LUNAR's network and email services.
"By continually creating email filters, over time the performance of the spam appliance slowed down," says Taylor. "Eventually, we had latency with our email of a minute to a minute and a half. A lot of email ended up getting spooled off to a secondary server, just because the appliance couldn't handle the volume."
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A Smarter Solution: Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker Today, small businesses like Miocon and LUNAR have a better option for dealing with spam and ®email threats: the Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker. The Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker is a dedicated anti-spam, anti-virus, and anti-phishing email security appliance that delivers extraordinary accuracy and ease of use, in a solution designed specifically for small businesses.
The Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker deploys in minutes, just behind the network firewall. (Figure 1.) Once installed, the solution uses award-winning filtering technology to process all email traffic coming into the business and identify even the latest spam and malware attacks. Only clean, valid email messages are passed onto employees.
Figure 1.

An Easy-to-Use Solution Where other spam solutions require extensive filter training and time-consuming manual administration, the Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker installs in just minutes and requires no configuration of "white list" or "black list" filters.
"Installation was very easy," says O'Coners. "We had it up and running in 10 minutes. It doesn't require any administrative time, and it's a low-overhead solution. You just plug it in and let it run."
"The installation of our previous spam appliance was a fairly lengthy process, so the Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker really took me by surprise," says Taylor. "Once we got it set up, I didn't have to create filters or train a database. It just worked."
Boosting Productivity Once installed, the Cisco Spam & Virus Blocker requires practically no ongoing administration, which is a huge benefit fo... [download for more]