Bank security spend beats spam and malware

Irish Life & Permanent (ILP), the third largest financial services company at the heart of the booming Irish economy has overhauled its email systems in a bid to improve efficiency and security.

ILP was looking to overcome two major problems: delays to the delivery of email, which incredibly hit four hours at peak times, and high volumes of spam and blocked content.

Much of the blocked content was wrongly flagged false-positives - or genuine emails intended for staff that had been flagged up because of content or key words. Managing the process of releasing those emails alone was a full-time job for one employee.

Much of the complexity was the result of previously failing to address the challenges of three mergers in eight years, which brought with them two legacy mail systems, according to Martin Farrelly, head of information security and network service at ILP. That added to the challenging demands the business was putting on an IT infrastructure which was already starting to creak.

Farrelly said 5,500 staff across the organisation were receiving around 1.5 million emails per month, 70 per cent of which was spam. In some cases these challenges meant genuine emails could take four hours to be delivered.

Farrelly told silicon.com: "Email is absolutely critical for a number of our business units," saying investments that rely upon up-to-the-minute values and prices cannot risk being undermined by poor communication. "We have to be sure that mail is being delivered in a timely fashion," he added.

Furthermore the company had to be sure it wasn't increasing times taken to deal with emails from its more than one million customers.

The company evaluated updates from its incumbent provider and an offering from Tumbleweed and settled on the latter's email firewall and anti-spam service which would stop much of the rogue traffic at the perimeter.

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Farrelly said the bank - which did not reveal the value of the deal - took two weeks to implement the service, with a further week of in-house training.

And he said he is delighted with the results. Farrelly said the job of reviewing blocked messages and false positives is now only a minor task each day and the delivery times have been brought back in line with the demands of the organisation, meaning productivity and the effectiveness of staff have both soared.

Farrelly said: "Now, the email is being delivered so quickly the ink is still wet. And we've ramped up security while cleaning out all the crap and the spam."