Outback Steakhouse

Outback Steakhouse Grills Spam with Proofpoint

CLOGGED INBOX COMPLAINTS WERE RAMPANT Outback Steakhouse, Inc. headquartered in Tampa, Fla. was founded in 1988 and operates Outback Steakhouse units throughout the U.S. as well as Carrabba's Italian Grill, Lee Roy Selmon's, Cheeseburger in Paradise, Bonefish Grill and Paul Lee's Chinese Kitchen. The company has 1,100 company-owned stores.

According to Outback Steakhouse Director of Technology Infrastructure, Michael Boykins, “We were getting a ton of calls from employees about being inundated with a high volume of all types of junk mail. This created a number of problems for the company.”

The first problem was lost productivity as workers had to spend large blocks of time sifting through junk mail every morning. This problem was compounded by a drain on IT resources as IT staff attempted to manually deal with the spam problem and IT infrastructure (such as mail servers, network bandwidth and storage systems) was becoming strained by the high volume of unsolicited messages. Lastly, the company felt it was important to protect its employees from exposure to offensive email content.

Any message protection solution Outback Steakhouse chose had to be extremely accurate due to the nature of the company's business. Many legitimate emails received by Outback employees deal with subjects and products commonly found in spam emails. For example, messages that contain content about “beer,” “liquor,” “cocktails” and other food and beverage terms can be inadvertently blocked by less sophisticated anti-spam techniques such as keyword matching or simple Bayesian techniques. A solution that filtered these emails incorrectly, creating “false positives,” would cause more harm than good.

TAKING SPAM OFF THE MENU
Realizing that something had to be done, Outback Steakhouse's IT team began evaluating a variety of anti-spam solutions, including a test deployment of a server-based solution. Unfortunately, the product had a high rate of false positives and required two members of the IT staff to manually sift through the email that was blocked each day in order to ensure that all legitimate email reached its intended recipients. This IT overhead was an unacceptable administrative cost.

“We realized pretty quickly that in addition to high accuracy, end-user control was important, due to the drain our first message protection installation put on IT,” said Chris Velez, Outback's senior systems engineer. “We decided we needed a new system that was highly accurate, easy to administer, worked out of the box, and sat at the gateway.”

Outback Steakhouse's team of Boykins and Velez ultimately looked at solutions from four vendors including Proofpoint, a competing appliance vendor, a mail server-based software vendor and a vendor of gateway anti-spam software. Several factors made the decision to select Proofpoint's Messaging Security Gateway an easy one. These included:

• Proofpoint's tremendous ease of administration: Outback found that the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway is easy to install, works right out of the box with little configuration and requires minimal ongoing administration. A centralized management console lets Outback's IT staff easily create and enforce email policies.
• High effectiveness without false positives: Powered by patent-pending Proofpoint MLX™ machine learning technology, the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway examines more than 100,000 attributes in every email message to accurately identify spam while ensuring that legitimate messages reach end users.
• Outstanding end-user control: Proofpoint gives end users control over their own personal safe- and block-lists and provides them with personalized digest emails that shows a summary of which emails have been blocked by the system. These features put users back in control of their inboxes and provide confidence that only unwanted mail is being blocked.
• Deployment at the gateway: The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway blocks spam and viruses at the perimeter of Outback's network, relieving the burden on downstream email servers, network connections and storage systems.
• Integrated virus protection: Proofpoint's modular approach to messaging security allowed Outback to deploy a single solution for anti-virus protection in addition to spam detection.

A G'DAY!
“When we initially implemented Proofpoint's Messaging Security Gateway the set up was ridiculously easy!” offered Velez. “We took it out of the box, plugged it in, fired it up, called Proofpoint's support team to walk us through the setup and were done in 30 minutes.”

According to Boykins results were immediate, “We began watching the logs and saw the capture of spam right away,” he said. “End-user feedback came just as quickly. We walked around the office and people said things like 'Wow, what happened?' In fact, the VP of marketing who had previously spent hours each day sifting through spam thanked the CIO for putting the product in. It was a good morning for us!”

Proofpoint worked amazingly well out of the box, but also provided Outback Steakhouse with enough flexibility to enable rules that were specific to its business. Although 70% of inbound email at Outback Steakhouse continues to be spam, the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway stops it at the gateway so it no longer impacts the business or hampers employee productivity.

Proofpoint's end-user controls allow users to set up their own safe- and block-lists and manage their own quarantined email, which eliminates the eight hours a day IT spent doing these tasks before the Proofpoint installation. Boykins notes that complaints of false positives from employees have been extremely rare since deploying the Proofpoint appliance.

“It's worth mentioning that Proofpoint's support staff has been incredible,” said Velez. “I always get immediate call backs when I open a support ticket, regardless of whether my question was large or small. They've been a great partner to us.” For additional information on Outback Steakhouse's use of Proofpoint to protect outbound email, please see the second Outback case study at: http://www.proofpoint.com/resources/CS-Proofpoint-Outback-Outbound.pdf.

ABOUT OUTBACK STEAKHOUSE
Outback Steakhouse, Inc. headquartered in Tampa, Florida was founded in 1988 by those who believe in hospitality, sharing, quality, being courageous and having fun! OSI is a company of restaurants that owns and operates Outback Steakhouse units throughout the U.S. as well as Carrabba's Italian Grill, Lee Roy Selmon's, Cheeseburger in Paradise, Bonefish Grill and Paul Lee's Chinese Kitchen. The Company also operates through joint venture agreements and existing franchise agreements additional Outback restaurants (including International locations), Carrabba's Italian Grill, Fleming's Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar. OSI also has a joint venture development relationship with Roy Yamaguchi, the chef and creator of Roy's Restaurants located in Hawaii, the U.S., and Japan.