The situation
When you are running a nuclear power facility, you do not need additional headaches. That’s why Lou Donato loves GWAVA.
Mr Donato is the Network Administrator for the South Texas Project nuclear facility. He has been administering the South Texas Project Electric Generating Station’s GroupWise mail system for seven years.
The energy generating site is one of the newest and largest nuclear power plants in the United States of America. Located about 90 miles southwest of Houston on a 12,220- acre site near Bay City, the site two reactors produce 2,500 megawatts of electricity,serving more than one million homes in south central Texas.
They’re used to doing things properly at this power station. The facility has won awards for being the most efficient generating facility in its class in addition to its enviable performance record.
Security, as you may expect, is their primary concern. Mr Donato says GWAVA does not add to his work. GWAVA subtracts from it. Each week, the power plant’s electronic mail system delivers 60,000 internet e-mail messages and 300,000 internal messages.
“I have one MTA, seven mail boxes and 1,800 users.” Mr Donato explains. Spam and virus filtering is a must. When it came time to implement eSecurity software, Mr Donato was pleased to find that installing GWAVA was as easy as one, two, and three.
One,Two, Three
“It was an advertisement,” he recalls where he first learned of GWAVA. “I tried the thirtyday free trial and it went really well.” The filtering in GWAVA was implemented easily. Rules were also very easy to edit and add. Implementing filters for words like “free” was an immediate priority and accomplished without a hitch, Mr Donato recalls.
“Support was great,” he adds. “No problem at all.”
Step two was making GWAVA work in concert with other security software. That was also snag-free. GWAVA works will all popular anti-virus NLMs.
“I use McAffee, the Networks Associates product,” the administrator explains. “I do a virus scanning nightly on the entire system.” The products combine well and catch malicious code entering the mail system. “It used to be an issue, but it’s not now.”
Step three was maintenance.
“There’s no maintenance required,” Mr Donato says. Certainly, he and his team fine tune the mail system monthly, but no constant attention is needed to make GWAVA work, Mr Donato concludes.
How it works
GWAVA is installed on the MTA. This allows it to examine every e-mail, in every Post Office, in the GroupWise system. This is superior to traditional eSecurity technologies. Because GWAVA lives inside the MTA, it moves all mail into a Quarantine Zone where it is decrypted and subjected to a battery of tests.
Anti-Spam heuristics, real time blackhole lists and an easily customized set of rules ensure that spam is blocked. Moreover, inside the Quarantine Zone, all mail and attachments can be examined by popular third-party anti-virus software to ensure that no destructive code is present.
File Fingerprinting is used to ensure that attachments are not disguised by using different extensions. This helps ensure that malicious VBS or PIF files are not camouflaged with extensions like .TXT or .RTF. Fingerprinting also helps ensure that non-business-related attachments like movies or executable games are tying up bandwidth on a corporate e-mail system.
The conclusion
Easy to install, integrate and administer, that is what mail administrators demand. This is what GWAVA delivers.
“The domes that produce the energy are designed to withstand the impact of a 747, and those are just the external walls” Mr Donato talks about the plant with pride. When it came to providing comparable security within, GWAVA was the product of choice.
Background
GWAVA is the leading eSecurity software for Novell GroupWise. Post office level scanning allows GWAVA to monitor all e-mail in GroupWise 6 to ensure communication is both virus and spam free.
“GWAVA is uniquely focused on eSecurity software for Novell GroupWise,” notes Charles Taite, Chief Technology Officer for Beginfinite, makers of GWAVA. “We have made a conscious decision to invest resources in Novell and its GroupWise platform. Thanks to Novell and DeveloperNet's invaluable assistance, we have been able to build GWAVA: a tightly integrated YES Tested & Approved eSecurity solution for GroupWise. The rapid adoption of GWAVA, and the very positive response from the GroupWise community, is proof-positive of the value of working with DeveloperNet and Novell's YES Testing program to develop high-quality solutions for Novell platforms."
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