Governing A Midsize Network

Fike Corporation, maker of fire protection, detection tools and industrial/dust explosion systems, was being buried by spam. “It was so bad that it started overwhelming our servers. We were having problems where e-mails that our users were trying to send weren’t going through because they were sitting in the queue behind thousands of [spam] messages. Our servers really were overwhelmed,” said Daniel Zani, director of information technologies at Fike, Blue Springs, Mo.

The company was using an e-mail filtering product that allowed them to scan for viruses and set policies for e-mail attachments, but the process for setting spam policies was cumbersome, and Fike didn’t have the staff to manage it.

Fike needed a solution that would keep its 600 worldwide employees’ e-mail up and running while also protecting its corporate data.

That’s when Zani received an e-mail from Jim Steinlage, president of Choice Solutions, a networking solution provider headquartered in Overland Park, Kan., that Fike had used for several projects in the past.

Steinlage told Zani about a managed service product that Choice was using to protect and filter its own e-mail servers from MX Logic, a Denver-based managed service provider. Zani contacted Steinlage to find out more.

“We had never had a managed service before, so I was a little bit reluctant about looking at any type of managed service. What was attractive about this was that it had Jim’s personal recommendation and also the fact that it tackles all of this before it hits our network, so we weren’t looking to deploy new hardware and software we hadn’t budgeted for,” Zani said.

“We went ahead, and it took about a day to roll it out. And I was a little bit concerned beforehand but it has totally exceeded our expectations,” he said. To install MX Logic, Choice Solutions pointed Fike’s e-mail to MX Logic, and it was routed back clean. Customers can monitor the e-mail filter and set policies through a Web interface.

Fike uses a McAfee antivirus product for its desktops and servers, so it opted to use Sophos antivirus software through MX Logic.

Pricing begins at $1 per user, Steinlage said, and the product can be customized by a solution provider if needed. Choice has sold it to approximately 70 customers.

“I don’t know one customer who’s quit using the service, and we’ve been doing it for about two years now. It’s a hosted solution so if someone is trying to flood you with spam, viruses and the works, it hits their pipes, and it’s not taking our customers’ pipes and getting them bogged down with junk,” Steinlage said.

“From our selfish point of view, it’s a recurring revenue stream with profit margin,” he said. “For us it’s a very easy sell. It’s a great situation. You put it in place and you don’t hear much about it.”

He said the product is a good fit for the midmarket company.

“We have some customers with several hundred employees who are using it, but the big enterprise accounts are going to have their own thing. It’s not affordable when you get into the thousands,” he said.

Fike is pleased with MX Logic’s service, and Zani said that it has dramatically reduced spam traffic and false-positive message quarantining. The service also was rolled out to a manufacturing plant in Canada and to its European offices.

“Immediately it totally relieved our Exchange server and our e-mail infrastructure,” Zani said.

In January, Fike received about 530,000 e-mail messages, and about 440,000 were classified as spam. Of those, only 340 were released as false-positives by employees. The filter also caught about 1,000 viruses, Zani said.

“That tells me that the stuff that’s being held is really spam. What somebody is releasing is something they want to receive,” he said.

Zani also likes his relationship with Steinlage and Choice.

“They understand our business, they understand our company, and they’re able to recommend solutions that they feel are good for us,” he said.