"I worked previously as an IT consultant and had always recommended Clearswift’s MIMEsweeper for SMTP software because I considered it to be head and shoulders above the competition. So when I came to Towergate I immediately rolled out the software across the organization."
Bob Cope, IT Operations Manager
Towergate partnership is the largest and fastest growing independent insurance organization in the UK, controlling in excess of £1.25bn of gross written premium. The company operates as both a retail insurance intermediary and a virtual insurer, working successfully in partnership with insurers, intermediaries and customers alike. It currently has over 3000 employees across 100 sites in the UK. Based in Romford, Bob Cope is the Group IT Operations Manager at Towergate Partnership and has been with the company for over two years. He is also one of the group’s technical architects. Cope leads a team of 23 and is responsible for managing all IT operations.
The importance of maintaining a reliable, threat-free email infrastructure for Towergate Partnership, email is vital to the day-to-day running of the business. Mission-critical web-based applications such as the e-trading and quotation systems rely on email and staff also use it for the majority of their communication. Employees send and receive between 7,000 and 10,000 emails per day. "Email is the lifeblood of this organization," explained Cope. "Without it…well we’d survive, but no-one would want to." Towergate needed to protect its IT infrastructure from digital threats such as spam and viruses in order to maintain the smooth running of not just the email infrastructure but the organization as a whole. "When I came to Towergate over two years ago, it had minimal IT security. I worked previously as an IT consultant and had always recommended Clearswift’s MIMEsweeper for SMTP software because I considered it to be head and shoulders above the competition. So when I came to Towergate I immediately rolled out the software across the organization," Cope said.
Prior to installing Clearswift’s MIMEsweeper for SMTP software, Cope had no way of managing employee email use. MIMEsweeper offers the most granular policy management in the industry, with policy templates and wizards to make it easy to design, deploy and update.
The software allowed Cope to set rules for the types of emails that employees could send and receive. Emails are blocked based on varying criteria such as file type, size and word analysis. This prevents security threats such as viruses from entering the company and confidential information from leaving - safeguarding the organization from the inside as well as the outside.
To complement this, Cope set about implementing "Email Use Best Practice" guidelines. The guidelines keep staff fully informed and educated about email threats and all employees are required to sign it to ensure they understand the risks of certain email behavior and the importance of IT security. The Best Practice initiative was rolled out in January and the document is reviewed on a quarterly basis to keep it updated.
Cope will be sticking with Clearswift for the foreseeable future and is in the process of setting up his two appliances so that they run together in high availability.
Cope has also recently purchased MIMEsweeper for Web, which will be running on the server to monitor web content. MIMEsweeper for Web applies the same award-winning bi-directional content filtering to web traffic. It stops the spread of viruses and inappropriate content and also stops leakage of confidential information via webmail accounts, blogs and web postings. The solution is also granular so different policies can be set for any user or class of users to reflect business needs.
