Community Medical Center

Proofpoint Inoculates Community Medical Centers from Spam, Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway™ Delivers Total Message Protection for Central California's Largest Healthcare Provider

PROTECTING THE HOMESTEAD FROM SPAM Community Medical Centers (Community) was founded in 1897 by Celia Burnett and a group of physicians in Fresno, California, as a boardinghouse for men who had left their families in search of opportunities in the west. Over the course of the last century, Community evolved into a leader in the California health care industry. Community is now an integrated system of facilities and services with more than 16 major

The largest and most comprehensive hospital system in the San Joaquin Valley, Community provides care at all levels ranging from preventive education to outpatient services, to intensive hospital treatment and home health. Community boasts three major acute-care hospitals with facilities dedicated to cardiology and oncology, and the only level-one trauma and burn unit between Los Angeles and Sacramento. Today, Community continues its mission as a non-profit medical group dedicated to improving the health status of the community and promoting medical education throughout central California.

In the summer of 2004, with the number of e-mail related complaints growing, Rich Cummins, manager of network services at Community, and network administrator Suben Chhem, began focusing their attention on their growing spam problem. “We were noticing a fairly dramatic rise in the amount of spam on the network and spam-related complaints to IT. We knew this was not simply the byproduct of a growing employee base and that we needed to start tackling the issue before the problem became very complex,” Cummins said.

PROSPECTING FOR A SOLUTION
Over the next six months, Chhem and his team began selecting a messaging protection solution by outlining and ranking the criteria Community held as important. Initially they leaned toward software solutions but soon switched focus to include appliance offerings because this would provide a simple way to stop spam at the gateway. “We didn't want to have to install any agents or desktop clients on our network—this was a huge requirement. We also knew that the price point had to be reasonable,” Cummins said.

Before testing began, Chhem and Cummins estimated how much spam was hitting their network and from those numbers calculated the cost and man hours lost to dealing with unsolicited e-mail. “We estimated, based on our personal experience, that each of our users was burning at least 10 minutes a day on spam deletion. Using that very conservative number, we averaged the cost of each worker's time to be approximately $30 an hour, again a conservative estimate, and calculated the savings. We determined that Community could save roughly $1.5 million annually through the implementation of an effective messaging protection solution. The numbers were very compelling,” Cummins said.

With the overwhelming approval of the management team at Community, Cummins and Chhem began product testing. The vetting process initially included tests of four different solutions: SurfControl, Mail Essentials, an anti-spam add-on from a leading anti-virus provider, and an additional product offering from Symantec (Brightmail) that proved to be too expensive and was quickly ruled out. A colleague told Chhem about Proofpoint and the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway as a solution that would meet his two key criteria of price point and ease of installation, so it was added to the test. Upon testing the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway, Cummins and his team were impressed. “The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway was much easier to use than any of the other software solutions we tested,” Chhem said.

According to Cummins, Community's precise spam volume was not known until after the test implementation of Proofpoint's technology. “We knew we had a growing spam issue but the precise scope of the problem was not apparent until we had the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway in place. Only then did we have the benchmarking and reporting tools to determine that upward of 50% of our 15,000-20,000 daily message volume was junk,” Cummins said.

After a very favorable test installation and full approval from management, Cummins and the team moved forward with a full-scale deployment of the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway. According to Cummins the installation process was extremely simple. “The appliance arrived and we were up and running on the preset spam blocking configurations within a matter of hours. All we had to worry about configuring were the network and routers. It was truly plug and play,” Cummins said. In addition to leveraging the predetermined spam policies and end-user digests, Cummins and his team also made use of the adult-content blocking module, which according to Cummins, has worked quite well for Community. Community also is leveraging Proofpoint's Virus Protection module (powered by McAfee) as an added layer of virus protection at the gateway.

“We like Proofpoint because it stops spam dead in its tracks before it hits the Exchange servers. From a network administration standpoint, Proofpoint is amazing. It takes pressure off of our network and storage and let us keep that traffic on the appliance and in the DMZ,” Chhem said. According to Chhem the end user experience was similarly positive. Users immediately remarked on the absence of spam and appreciated the availability of end user digests and customizable safe- and block-lists.

EUREKA! THE SPAM ISSUE IS SETTLED
“The effectiveness and performance of the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway has been great,” Cummins said. “We are now able to go into meetings with upper management and point to reports generated by the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway detailing exactly how much spam we are blocking. From there we can extrapolate how much time and money we are saving by having the technology in place. We're extremely happy.”

ABOUT COMMUNITY MEDICAL CENTERS
Community is a locally owned, not-forprofit, public-benefit organization providing central California with acute care, outpatient centers, clinics, home care, community education, physician groups and a physician residency program in conjunction with the University of California, San Francisco. Based in Fresno, Community is the region's largest health care provider. In 2004, Community provided more than $60 million in uncompensated care to those unable to pay. With 15 facilities, Community also is Fresno's largest private employer and is a leader in urban redevelopment with the construction of Community Regional Medical Center.