St. Johns County, Fla

St. Johns County, Florida Increases Worker Productivity, Eliminates Spam Emails and Frees Up Large Amounts of Storage and Network Capacity with Proofpoint™

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
Workers in St. Johns County, Fla., were inundated by spam. In fact, 7,000 of the 12,000 emails clogging employee inboxes each day — and consuming large amounts of network bandwidth — were spam. This impaired productivity, since workers had to manually identify and delete spam, often deleting legitimate messages by mistake. In addition, because Chapter 119 of Florida Statutes mandates that St. Johns County archive all of its emails, the county was spending large sums of money in storage space, just to archive spam. Finally, the large amount of pornographic spam coming through the email channel was also a liability concern for the county.

PROOFPOINT SOLUTION
St. Johns County selected the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway™ eradicate spam, increase employee productivity, reduce legal liability and conserve computing resources.

RESULTS ACHIEVED
After deploying the Proofpoint appliance, St. Johns County experienced an immediate reduction in the amount of spam received. The total number of incoming emails decreased 60%, from 12,000 per day to 5,000 per day. Thanks to Proofpoint, the county's spam problems — and all associated risks — disappeared literally overnight.

PRODUCTS DEPLOYED

Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway
Proofpoint Content Compliance
Proofpoint Spam Detection
Proofpoint Virus Protection

The results were amazing. After a weekend of testing,my director asked me on Monday morning what we changed, because his inbox was suddenly free of spam.

Jim Hite
Supervisor of Network Services and,
Central Operations for PWCS

ELIMINATING SPAM EMAILS, PROTECTING EMPLOYEES St. Johns County encompasses 608 square miles in northeastern Florida and is home to nearly 125,000 people. The county is quickly growing in population, ranking 23rd in the United States in population growth from 1970 through 1990, and growing 47% in the last decade alone.

County employees were growing frustrated over the steadily increasing volume of spam emails coming into their inboxes. This problem became especially acute when pornographic spam started entering the network. St. Johns County knew that it had to take action to eliminate spam emails, because it could be held legally accountable if employees felt harassed by the offensive spam emails.

In addition to liability issues, St. Johns County also had to comply with Chapter 119 of Florida Statutes. This statute governs public records and requires that the county archive all of its employee emails. Without an effective solution in place to eliminate spam emails, this meant that the county was archiving all of the spam messages, in addition to legitimate employee emails. This wasted huge amounts of disk space and made the email retrieval process incredibly cumbersome, because many thousands of spam emails had to be searched to find the requested legitimate email message.

St. Johns County set out to find an anti-spam solution that would eliminate all unwanted spam email, but would also require very little administration and integrate easily with its Microsoft Exchange email server. The county considered several solutions to eliminate spam email before going through an intensive evaluation of three products. Ultimately, St. Johns County determined that the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway best met its needs.

PROTECTING EMPLOYEES BY STOPPING SPAM BEFORE IT REACHES THEIR INBOXES
The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway provided St. Johns County with an easyto- deploy solution for complete email protection. The appliance uses Proofpoint MLX™ Machine Learning technology to deliver the highest effectiveness rate of any enterprise anti-spam solution. St. Johns County is currently using one Proofpoint P600 appliance to protect all of its 1,200 employee mailboxes.

Proofpoint lived up to the promise of providing a solution that could be quickly implemented. St. Johns County got the appliance up and running in minutes and immediately saw the volume of spam hitting its Exchange servers drop from 60% to virtually zero.

“The Proofpoint appliance went to work right away and was so accurate that it required very little adjustment on our part,” said Wylie Thibault, director of IT for St. Johns County. “It was amazing how quickly our spam problem disappeared.”

Thibault said that the Proofpoint appliance delivered an extremely fast return-on-investment by freeing up significant amounts of network bandwidth and storage capacity, reducing spam-related help-desk calls and eliminating spam-related legal liability due to inappropriate email content. “We no longer need to worry about our employees being offended due to content they receive each day at work,” said Thibault. “Not only are our workers satisfied, but my department is also relieved because we're not fielding angry calls about spam.”

PROOFPOINT MESSAGE PROTECTION TO GUARD AGAINST FUTURE THREATS
St. Johns County currently has the spam detection, virus protection and content compliance modules installed on the Proofpoint P600 appliance. While St. Johns County is currently using just the spam detection module, it plans to use the virus protection and content compliance modules for complete messaging security.

“We are very interested in using the content compliance module to monitor our outbound emails to ensure that sensitive county information is not allowed to leave our network,” said Thibault. “It was important for us to adopt a solution that is scalable and flexible enough to effectively combat message-borne threats of all types – spam, viruses and outgoing email content.”

ABOUT ST. JOHNS COUNTY
St. Johns County is home to more than 123,000 people and many businesses that are served by three municipalities and the county government. The county is 608 square miles and is surrounded with beaches, riverfront and dozens of historical landmarks, which makes it ideally positioned to attract visitors and industry. The county was created in 1832 when General Andrew Jackson, Governor of the Territory of Florida, divided the state in two counties. The East was designated St. Johns County and the West was named Escambia County. St. Johns County has since diminished in size to approximately 608 square miles, but remains one of the foremost counties in Florida and the Nation.