USA.NET

Requirement for an accurate and scalable messaging abuse solution due to growth of business and rise in spam volumes.

"We chose Cloudmark because of its unique technology for detecting and blocking spam, its seamless integration with third-party products and the fact that Cloudmark is dedicated to solving spam and virus problems." — Steve O’Brien, USA.net

View the customer story to learn more.

1. Overview
2. Profile
3. Business Challenges
4. The Cloudmark Solution
5. Results
6. Conclusion

Overview

Customer

USA.NET, a large US-based ISP, hosts more than 1 million end-user inboxes.

Industry

Internet Service Provider

Business Challenge

USA.NET wanted to provide additional messaging protection for its customers by enhancing the existing security infrastructure.

Cloudmark Solution

• Cloudmark Authority
• Cloudmark Sender Intelligence (CSI)

Benefits

• Increased spam protection by intelligently blocking up to 40% more incoming mail as spam.
• Zero latency and high performance across the messaging platform while adding increased security for messaging abuse.
• Space, power and cooling efficiency.

Profile

USA.NET helps companies both large and small outsource their messaging needs. Today, some 1,600 business clients with a total of more than 1 million end-user mailboxes depend on USA.NET for improved reliability, uptime, safety and security of their messaging and collaboration.

USA.NET is dedicated to maximizing value for its customers. In addition to hosting Microsoft Exchange servers for messaging and collaboration, the company also offers its custom-developed Commercial Messaging Service (CMS) platform to customers who want a white-label, hosted email solution. USA.NET also provides a gateway services infrastructure and an archiving solution among its other offerings.

Business Challenges

To ensure information security for its many business customers, USA.NET had long used several spam and virus control solutions. In an effort to provide additional value to their customers and stay ahead of malicious activity and fraudsters, the company was looking to add enhanced layers of messaging protection to ensure their users were receiving the best possible business services available.

“Spam continues to evolve,” said Mike Rothwell, senior director of systems engineering at USA.NET. “Spammers are always trying to stay one step ahead, continually testing anti-spam engines to optimize their attacks. That’s why we take a comprehensive approach to security, leveraging the strength of best-of-breed vendors to provide premium value to our customers.”

The Cloudmark Solution

In early 2009, USA.NET launched an initiative to further improve the protection of its messaging services. A key component of this effort was the search for a highly accurate, scalable and high-performing messaging protection solution that would integrate with its Linux servers. Managers wanted a solution that would integrate well with USA.NET’s existing messaging infrastructure and would protect its users against spam, phishing, and virus attacks.

USA.NET’s IT staff began evaluating various vendors who provide email defense services to protect their profile of over 1,000,000 hosted email boxes. In a thorough evaluation Cloudmark Authority kept rising to the top.

In the spring of 2009, USA.NET brought Cloudmark Authority into its testing lab to test accuracy and the catch rate of spam and other malicious content. The results of this internal trial program proved the value that Cloudmark Authority could offer USA.NET’s customers.

According to Steve O’Brien, Senior Vice President of messaging for USA.NET, “We chose Cloudmark because of its unique technology for accurately detecting and blocking existing and evolving spam, its ability to integrate into our existing environment and the fact that Cloudmark is a company that’s dedicated to solving spam and virus problems. So when it came to messaging security, Cloudmark was our top choice for this project.”

In June 2009, USA.NET purchased the Cloudmark solution, which included:

• Cloudmark Authority solution with anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing
• Cloudmark Sender Intelligence IP reputation service

“Deployment of Cloudmark Authority only took a single evening,” said Rothwell. “Initially, we launched it to our consumer domain www.netaddress. com. Because they’ve been with us since the late 90s, their email addresses are on the greatest number of spammer’s lists. Once we saw how dramatically the amount of spam reaching end-user inboxes dropped, we deployed it to the bulk of our commercial user base.”

Results

Since implementing the Cloudmark Authority solution, USA.NET has seen dramatic results:

Increased spam protection

USA.NET has seen a significant increase in spam protection. For example, in a recent test, the previous implementation had caught 7,000 spam messages while Cloudmark Authority caught an additional 40,000 more spam messages.

Zero latency and high performance across existing messaging platform

USA.NET was able to implement the Cloudmark solution without increasing its existing number of back-end mail servers. This speaks volumes about the efficiency with which Cloudmark Authority operates and its ability to integrate with other third-party products.

Conclusion

Currently, IT staff at USA.NET are evaluating the anti-virus capabilities of Cloudmark Authority and determining how those capabilities will best fit into the company’s infrastructure. In the near future, they will begin evaluating Cloudmark Sender Intelligence to see how they can best leverage the automated and anonymous traffic analysis from dedicated security analysts and the Global Threat NetworkTM of trusted reporters.