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Customer Profile

MSP Gains Competitive Advantage and Control with Message Systems; Reduces Infrastructure Costs

A leading global provider of messaging security and management services to businesses chose Message Systems to gain better control over its email system, reduce costs and deliver new services to customers quicker. Delivered across a globally distributed platform at the Internet level, the company's fully managed services ensure the integrity of electronic communications, allowing its enterprise customers to manage and reduce risk while securing their critical infrastructure and information. The U.K.-based managed service provider (MSP) processes 1.5 billion messages a week and provides its clients with reassurance and security at a low, predictable cost.

More than 14,000 businesses around the world, with six million users, look to this MSP to ensure business continuity, regulatory compliance, reputation and brand by guarding against email threats such as viruses, spam, identity theft and targeted blackmail campaigns. The company's customers are typically distributed enterprises with thousands of employees located in numerous locations around the world. Because of its extraordinary protection guarantee to its customers, the company needed an email infrastructure that would ensure the highest level of service.

Searching for a Better Way

The MSP's email infrastructure was a victim of the company's own success. Rapid global customer acquisition was straining an outmoded IT infrastructure that had grown organically throughout more than a dozen centers located on four continents. Rolling out new security tools to customers took months, compromising the company's competitiveness and response to customer requirements. Moreover, it was slow, expensive to maintain, difficult to manage, and did not scale well.

The company needed a better email architecture: one that would allow them to be proactive and competitive, while reducing overhead costs. By spring 2005 the field of contenders had been narrowed to Bizanga, Coldspark and Message Systems. Based on the technical qualifications presented in the RFP, Message Systems was asked to conduct a formal proof-of-concept. This was successfully concluded five months later when the Message Systems email software solution was selected in November 2005.

Today, the MSP is realizing a host of benefits from its new email platform as it systematically rolls out new security technologies and retrofits existing services on the Message Systems Message Transfer Agent (MTA).

Comprehensive Threat Protection Out of the Box

The MSP guarantees their enterprise customers 100 percent protection from viruses. To do this, they employed commercial and proprietary threat protection solutions, but they also wanted a gateway that would stop 90 percent of bad mail from getting to their backend filters. They knew Message Systems would be able to provide this level of protection on the edge through a number of advanced capabilities, including tar pitting, connection bandwidth management and traffic shaping.

"Message Systems understands that controlling traffic at the gate is critical to overall security," said the MSP's Chief Architect. "We were able to take advantage of a number of Message Systems' front-end threat control strategies right out of the box. For example, we now have the ability to make definitive decisions about what mail we will accept based on criteria such as the IP address or the operating system the mail is being sent from before it enters into our system and hits a scanner."

Message Systems' Modular Approach Eases Technology Rollouts

Unlike ISPs that typically have one or two service classes, this MSP must support different service classes for each of its 14,000 business customers. The company offers a host of security solutions, allowing each corporate customer to selectively determine the appropriate mix for their business needs. To rapidly respond to customer demands and support this complex level of customization, it needed a flexible and extensible framework that would allow its developers to build out new service offerings without impacting the entire infrastructure.

While Message Systems includes integrated best-of-breed third-party threat protection products, the modularity of its MTA framework eases the task of integrating new proprietary and commercial solutions. This is a key benefit for the MSP because of its need to quickly deliver new solutions to its customers.

Prior to Message Systems, the company's cumbersome architecture was based on open source and proprietary technologies. The rules engine was inflexible and the architecture was not designed to easily accept new technologies. For the development team, it was becoming exponentially more complex to add new features to the product.

"Our old architecture was monolithic and no longer being maintained by the vendor, which meant any new services we needed we had to add in ourselves," said the Chief Architect. "Because of the design of that MTA, every time we needed to change or add something, the whole system had to be re-tooled top to bottom and re-tested, causing our product release cycles to average six to nine months."

Taking advantage of Message Systems' modular architecture, the MSP's developers can now quickly add new modules to keep pace with the changing market. Because these modules do not affect the core of the solution, there is no need to re-architect or rebuild the entire system each time a new security solution is integrated. This modular approach also reduces failure. If there is an issue with a new tool, the component can be turned off so it doesn't affect the entire system.

"The ability to respond to customers and move at market speed was a driving factor in our decision to choose Message Systems," said the Chief Architect. "Message Systems' plug-in architecture and open interfaces make it much easier for us to add new commercial and proprietary threat protection solutions to our product: we simply load them in. It seamlessly integrates as a native application within the Message Systems email solution framework, without impacting the entire architecture or compromising service. Another advantage is that it is self-contained, which means we can have multiple development teams working on integrating different services at the same time without them running into each other in the MTA."

The ability to integrate new solutions quickly into the Message Systems MTA recently proved instrumental in gaining an important enterprise customer. "On our old system, we would not have been able to implement a new service in the time allotted to win the customer," said the Chief Architect.

Spam Spike puts Message Systems to the Test

The ease of integration was tested in October 2006 when the MSP realized a sudden 40 percent spike in spam over the course of a few weeks. According to the Chief Architect, "Message Systems enabled us to respond quickly to this rapidly changing threat landscape. At the time of the spam spike-even though we had not completed the Message Systems roll out-we were able to react very quickly by deploying a set of Message Systems servers within two days-and most of that time was waiting for the new hardware to come in."

The MSP implemented a simple, yet effective type of gray listing on the Message Systems server to handle the influx of spam. In addition, Message Systems' policy engine and traffic shaping were employed on the front end to stem the flow of spam. "Because of Message Systems' modularity, our usual several-week test cycle was reduced to almost no time and we had the full confidence to roll it out to the other data centers immediately," said the Chief Architect.

The Chief Architect compares the difference between rolling out a new service on the company's old MTA and the new Message Systems solution to car repair. "With our old MTA it was like having to switch out the entire engine every time we needed to add a new service. With Message Systems, it's more like replacing a sparkplug."

The MSP also saw a substantial hardware savings. "Because the Message Systems servers were handling vastly more connections than our existing solution could, we saw a 10:1 reduction in the number of servers we needed to deploy," said the Chief Architect. "We only had to install one Message Systems server in each of our three affected regions to handle the spam spike"

Setting Policies at a Granular Level Makes Customized Service Delivery Easy

Because the MSP takes a custom approach to service delivery, it needs the flexibility to easily adopt new policies and business logic into the way mail flows through its systems based on each of its enterprise customer's requirements. Message Systems' policy engine enables the company to set policies and service levels at a granular level on a specific portion of the architecture without having to make that portion different from a technology basis.

The Chief Architect explained, "With Message Systems, we can set individual policies for how mail should be handled for each of our 14,000 customers based on the message envelope header. We have tens of thousands of domains we process traffic for and they all have different requirements, so being able to control the flow of traffic on a domain by domain basis is very important to us."

Streamlined Infrastructure and Greater Manageability

The MSP's outdated email infrastructure was growing out of control due to the company's success. Spread across four continents and comprised of thousands servers-each equipped with its own MTA-it was becoming increasingly more expensive and difficult to manage. Thanks to Message Systems' ability to support 100,000 concurrent connections per server and to handle ten times the number of messages of a traditional server, the company is planning to re-architect its infrastructure. Message Systems' Virtual IP capability and its scalability will allow it to handle vastly more connections per server and spread out the mail coming in through one MTA to multiple servers for scanning.

"One of the biggest benefits of the Message Systems solution for us is its scalability," said the Chief Architect. "As we rollout the Message Systems solution as part of our core infrastructure we expect to see an 80 to 90 percent reduction in the number MTAs we will be supporting. This means we will have fewer machines to monitor, which when combined with Message Systems administration tools, will dramatically reduce our administration costs."

He continued, "Taking the MTA off of each processing server will free up some of the capacity of our existing servers to handle the future load generated by new customers. In terms of hardware cost savings, this will prolong the time before we have to invest in new servers and the re-architected environment will also reduce the number of load balancers we need by an estimated 80 percent."

"One the things that first attracted us to Message Systems was its clustering capability," said the Chief Architect. To control and reduce overhead costs and simplify configuration and administration, the MSP takes advantage of Message Systems' clustering capability. Message Systems is the only solution provider to offer full clustering-configuration, logging and metrics-with high availability. A clustered configuration has several advantages. It makes server configuration and management easier and less costly, while ensuring all servers are configured the same simultaneously. It also provides automatic failover to ensure delivery continuity.

Under its old MTA architecture, the MSP's MTAs are unable to communicate with each other. Because a customer might be served by hundreds of the company's MTAs, the inability to communicate can cause a major problem when a customer goes down. The mail will queue up on each of the servers and when the customer comes up again, all of the servers will suddenly start sending out all of the queued mail simultaneously. This volume of incoming mail can sometimes cause the customer to go down again.

"Because of its clustering ability, all of the Message Systems servers cooperate with each other," said the Chief Architect. "This will allow us to control the flow of the queued messages to match the threshold the customer can actually accept to prevent further problems."

What's more, clustering offers an easy way to retrieve data from servers for timely reporting and analysis. "From an operational viewpoint, one of the huge benefits of Message Systems is the amount of monitoring and management information that's available straight out of the box," said the Chief Architect. "We now have visibility into our infrastructure on demand and can drill down to the details, giving us much greater insight into what's going on. At any given moment we can watch the flow of mail, monitor the size of queues and tell whether or not there is any compromise in service. This enables us to detect a problem on the fly and take immediate corrective action within the software before it begins to have a larger effect on customer service."

This real-time visibility was especially important during the October 2006 spam spike. "Within 10 minutes of putting our new idea into play we were able to see through the Message Systems console if it was solving the problem," said the Chief Architect. "By knowing within minutes of installation that our new solution was effectively reducing spam coming into our U.K. server, we had the confidence to immediately roll it out on the two servers located in our U.S. and Asia installations. It also enabled us to quickly report our success to management."

When the Solution is More than Technology

"We choose the Message Systems email software solution based on its outstanding technical merits and innovations, the breadth and depth of its employees' collective experience and expertise, not to mention their contributions to the email industry and their commitment to customers," said the Chief Architect. "The support we've received throughout the process has been so exceptional that we now consider Message Systems an extension of our team. If I need something done right and I need it in a hurry, Message Systems is my first call every time."