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MSP secures company's e-mail - Trends - Air Products uses MessageLabs' SkyScan AV

Communications News, June, 2002

With an electronic messaging system currently handling a massive 1.5 million e-mails every month, Air Products, Allentown, PA, is sensitive to the threat of viruses penetrating its networks. As a multinational business constantly exchanging information with customers, partners and suppliers across virtually every continent of the world, potential exposure to viral infection is a constant concern.

Air Products produces industrial and specialty gases, chemicals and polymers, essential ingredients of products ranging from aircraft to zippers. The volume of e-mail traffic passing into and out its operations in 30 countries with a workforce of 17,500 makes Air Products a prime candidate for virus attacks. When the Love Bug struck, the company's IT staff went into high gear.

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"We immediately shut down all our external gateways," says Jack Fekula, manager of the company's Integrity Team. "Even so, the attack caused us big problems. We had the system closed off for a day while we uploaded fixes, but you can imagine that a day's downtime in a business of our scale makes an extremely expensive impact on operations."

The experience galvanized Air Products' determination to gain protection from any future attacks. "We have had good antivirus software working for us on all our servers, PCs and e-mail firewalls for a long while," says Fekula, "but it was always a challenge to keep downloading signatures from the vendors as new viruses appeared, if signatures were actually available."

The company made the strategic decision to protect itself against future e-mail-borne virus threats by using MessageLabs' SkyScan AV managed e-mail security service. The service intercepts virus-infected e-mails at the Internet level with the use of four scanners--McAfee, F-source, V-Find and MessageLabs' own heuristics and rules-based scanner, Skeptic, which uses patented artificial intelligence to identify new viruses without the need for signatures.

The use of such managed service providers is expected to increase dramatically in the next three years, according to research firm IDC. It estimates the size of the market will jump from $172 million in 2000 to more than $1 billion by 2005, a 44% combined annual growth rate.

Air Products was the first global organization to take on the managed e-mail security service from MessageLabs, and the $5.5-billion company implemented the service quickly, with no additional investment in hardware, software or management time. During the first 10 months, nearly seven million inbound e-mails passed through the system, as well as more than three million outgoing--with more than 14,000 virus-carrying e-mails being intercepted by the service. Nevertheless, Air Products has not had a single e-mail-borne virus penetrate its messaging networks.

The company retains its in-house antivirus software to maintain protection from viruses entering via other Internet channels, as well as from CDs and floppy disks. The managed service, however, which is mirrored globally for guaranteed resilience and is supported and managed 24x7 by specialist virus technicians, has become the Air Product's primary defense in its e-mail security strategy.

From more information from MessageLabs: www.rsleads.com/205cn-262

Technology Industry

MSP secures company's e-mail - Trends - Air Products uses MessageLabs' SkyScan AV

Communications News, June, 2002

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