Based in Glasgow, the Scottish Exhibition & Conference Centre (SECC) is Scotland’s national venue for conferences, exhibitions, sporting events, and concerts. With over 1.5 million visitors and 250 events each year, it is the U.K.’s largest integrated exhibition and conference center.

The SECC’s IT department already had a product to manage e-mail filtering, but it didn’t block a considerable amount of spam, generated numerous false alerts, and had inadequate reporting features. Department members searched for a better system and selected SurfControl® RiskFilter®. Delivering world-class heuristics technology and backed by Global Threat Experts, the RiskFilter appliance met the organization’s needs—without straining its IT resources.

According to Alan Taylor, SECC IT Manager, “Deployment of SurfControl’s RiskFilter was quick and straightforward. My team and I got to grips with the appliance extremely quickly, and we were impressed with the ease of implementation.”

Operating RiskFilter, which monitors inbound and outbound e-mail, has been comparably smooth, easy, and efficient, Taylor adds. “The reporting features were very easy to customize, particularly compared to our previous solution, which was quite cumbersome to navigate and time consuming to manage. We’ve halved the time spent on administrative tasks from four hours per week to just two hours.”

RiskFilter’s reporting features also make it easy for Taylor to monitor and enforce their Internet acceptable use policy. “We now run reports on a daily basis to help us monitor the levels of unwanted e-mail entering our system, as well as formal reports for the HR department when required,” he says.

Taylor points to a valuable statistic that RiskFilter generates: “The pre-defined reports that SurfControl provides show that 60 to 65% of all e-mail entering our systems are unwanted and illegitimate. Previously, all this spam would have reached users’ inboxes, but it is now caught at the door, before entering our network. We have never had access to this kind of information before,” explains Taylor. He adds that efficiency is further boosted because effective spam blocking eliminates problems with spam-based malware.

“SurfControl has undoubtedly made life easier for us at the SECC,” says Taylor. “RiskFilter comes straight out of the box and is up and running. It is a great product, and we are delighted with the results.”

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