Email Systems and Ajilon ñ Case Study

The Ajilon Group, a global provider of Managed Services, Consulting and Speciality Staffing, comprises UK brands such as Office Angels, Computer People, OAexec, Jonathan Wren, Roevin and Ajilon Consulting amongst others. Worldwide, the Group has 450 offices operating across 17 countries, including North America, Europe and Asia Pacific. Ajilon specialises in several industries: Information Technology, Communications, Engineering, Finance and Accounting, Legal, Office, Sales and Marketing.

Issues
With employees across the UK arm of the group increasingly relying on email, the content management solution that had been developed in-house some years previously was proving ineffective, with the number of unsolicited emails far outnumbering the legitimate ones being received each day group-wide.

Consequently, Ajilon recognised that there was an immediate requirement to work with a third party in order to solve the problem and reclaim email as an effective business tool.

Users
The majority of the 1,300 users will simply see the benefits of the implementation as the system is managed and administered by the Ajilon Groupís IT department.

Services
The Ajilon Group chose Email Systems primarily due to its ability to deliver a high quality solution to the exact specifications required. A strong working relationship amongst the team and high levels of customer service were also key factors in the appointment.

Ajilon required Email Systems to deliver three key modules, which were subsequently implemented across the group:

Content Management Module - Allowing the Ajilon Group to block, redirect or delete any emails that match defined criteria and set filtering by sender, words, attachment, size or time of day amongst other options

Anti-Spam Module ñ Delivering global monitoring of spam and email trends which allows Email Systems to catch 98.2% of spam with virtually zero false positives

Anti-Virus Module - A sophisticated heuristic based anti-virus technology that blocks 100% of all known viruses

Results
Since the service was installed, the quantity of spam delivered to the inboxes across the Ajilon Group has dropped from more than two thirds of all incoming mail to virtually zero.

The Ajilon Group lists the principal benefits of installing the Email Systems solution as:

Reclaiming Bandwidth. Given the newly reduced levels of incoming email traffic, Ajilon Group saves a significant amount of corporate bandwidth on a daily basis

Saving on Employee / Business Time. It has been estimated that each spam mail takes three seconds to deal with, meaning that for a business of 1,300 employees, such as The Ajilon Group an average of 7,592 hours are wasted each year just dealing with spam

Increased Employee Protection. Increasingly, employers are considered responsible for the content that employees are subjected to during the course of their working day. With adequate protection in place to ensure that employees are not targeted with undesirable content, both employees and employers are protected

Helen Ackroyd, Group Business Services Director, said:
ìThe Email Systems solution has been an extremely timely intervention for Ajilon as the situation demanded that we find a way to cleanse our corporate network of spam in order to get back to using email effectively. The system was extremely quick to implement and was rolled out across the group with seemingly little effort required on our part. In a short space of time our corporate email has reverted from being blighted by time and bandwidth-sapping constraints to being clean, effective and worry-free, as it should be.î

The Ajilon Group are exhibiting at Infosecurity Europe 2005 which is Europe’s number one information Security Event. Now in its 10th anniversary year, Infosecurity Europe continues to provide an unrivalled education programme, new products & services, over 250 exhibitors and 10,000 visitors from every segment of the industry. Held on the 26th ñ 28th April 2005 in the Grand Hall, Olympia, this is a must attend event for all IT professionals involved in Information Security.