Real World Solutions from People in the Trenches featuring Proofpoint and Butler University

By Messaging News staff
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Like most large organizations, Butler University has seen overall email volumes rise significantly over the years. Today the university averages one million inbound messages per day, 90 percent of which are spam. Since 2004, Butler University has used the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway appliance to defend against inbound messaging threats such as spam, viruses and denial-of-service attacks. As the university’s email volumes have grown, its Proofpoint deployment has also expanded.

Most recently, Butler University has taken advantage of Proofpoint’s hybrid deployment options, adding Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway — Virtual Edition appliances to create a mixed hardware / virtual environment. The university uses hardware appliances to scan inbound mail, while virtual appliances, which leverage the university’s existing VMware infrastructure, scan the outbound messaging stream to ensure that sent messages are also free from spam content, viruses and other malicious code. This prevents students from propagating spam and viruses and enables the university to detect botnet infections among its user base. According to Proofpoint this "hybrid", approach of combining physical and virtual appliances can scale indefinitely to support millions of inbound and outbound email messages per day and provides the university with 100 percent system redundancy.

"The Proofpoint virtual appliance was extremely easy to deploy and provides the same high-level of spam and virus protection as Proofpoint’s hardware appliance," says Nathan Partenheimer, systems administrator, Information Resources department at Butler University. "With the Proofpoint virtual appliance in place we can easily and cost-effectively scale to manage spikes in inbound or outbound email, as new virtual appliances can be provisioned in minutes to address our changing email requirements."

Published December 23, 2008