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Consolidated Communications Standardizes On Mirapoint's Message Server And RazorGate
SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2004-09-21
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Mirapoint Solutions Enable Consolidated Communications To Deliver Spam & Virus-Free, Carrier-Grade Email For Business & Consumer Subscribers.
Mirapoint today announced that Consolidated Communications has standardized on Mirapoint's Message Server and RazorGate appliance solutions for core email services plus spam and virus protection. Prior to Mirapoint, Consolidated used a freeware-based solution that was prone to outages, difficult to manage, expensive to maintain, and overloaded by spam and virus traffic. After deploying Mirapoint's email and security appliances, including the MailHurdle technology, Consolidated has been able to block the majority of spam and virus traffic at the network edge, thereby conserving resources, while delivering dial-tone reliable email services to more than 60,000 business and consumer subscribers.
Prior to Mirapoint, Consolidated received roughly 900,000 messages a day, and more than 70% of that traffic was identified as spam. This deluge of excess traffic strained Consolidated's servers, and the high management costs associated with their freeware-based system, forced Consolidated to evaluate other messaging solutions. Consolidated evaluated a number of competitive offerings and selected Mirapoint for its easy-to-manage, secure, and reliable solution. Plus, with Mirapoint's integrated approach to the entire message network -- routing, storage, access, management and security -- Consolidated has a truly unified platform that's easy to maintain and can scale with future subscriber and message volume growth.
For email security, Mirapoint's MailHurdle technology allows Consolidated to block over 60% of unwanted spam traffic at the network edge and then use Mirapoint's other multi-layered Full-Spectrum spam analytics to achieve overall catch-rates of 98% with very low false positives. MailHurdle technology is unique, and depends on the analysis of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) connection to make determinations about what is and is not spam. This analysis occurs before the message enters the network and significantly reduces the amount of IT administration time, network bandwidth and storage that is wasted processing large volumes of spam messages, and helps stop many viruses that use email to propagate. In addition, Mirapoint's integrated virus-scanning analytic engine has helped Consolidated protect its business and consumer customers from threats, including recent Zafi, Netsky, MyDoom, and Bagle viruses.
For core email services, Consolidated depends on Mirapoint's Message Server to provide basic POP and Webmail services to its subscribers. One of the primary reasons that Consolidated selected Mirapoint appliances was the simple upgrade and patch management process provided through Mirapoint's Messaging Operating System (MOS) software. Mirapoint's MOS is delivered as a single software image and provides the industry's only tight integration and optimization of both Operating System (OS) and application components. As a result, customers get a higher quality product and do not need to worry about keeping up with individual patches and updates. With MOS, Consolidated can configure automatic network-based updates to be pushed to their Mirapoint email and security appliances and dramatically ease administrator's headaches around managing version control or interoperability testing.
"With Mirapoint, we've been able to set up the systems quickly and deliver reliable email and security services that are always-available to our subscribers," said Rob Koester, Manager of Data Services at Consolidated Communications. "And when new features are available from Mirapoint, we can quickly take advantage of updates with confidence they will continue to work seamlessly on our Mirapoint systems as well as with adjacent equipment in our network. No other solution on the market has such an easy, zero-touch approach like Mirapoint."
Looking ahead, the end-to-end Mirapoint email and security 'service-delivery' platform will enable Consolidated to expand its billable services to include security filtering services for business customers, hosted messaging with vanity domains to complement Consolidated's web hosting business, as well as other next-generation services that will be accessible through Consolidated's web portal.
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SecurityProNews is a daily online and email publication focusing on internet security issues.
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