Drowning in Spam, U-Tenn Finds a Cheaper Lifejacket

Every day, the University of Tennessee Medical Center gets a gift from the outside world - a big box of spam. The 100,000 daily inbound e-mails arriving at the Knoxville-based teaching hospital are predominately spam, says Jerry Hook, I.T. server manager. "About 90,000 of them," he says. "The key is to keep them out of my system."

Hook recently found a way to do that - one that represented a reduction in capital spending alone of at least $60,000 over the next three years. His purchase of bundled spam filtering and archiving software from a single vendor amounted to that much, compared to renewing and expanding his previous two software suppliers. For Hook, the contract with Newton, Mass.-based Mimecast provided immediate ROI. For $115,000, Hook obtained software that handles the hospital's e-mail needs remotely, letting the manager sidestep the server maintenance chores he faced with his earlier suppliers, Symantec Corp. (for archiving) and McAfee Inc. (for filtering). Renewed individually, the two packages would have cost in excess of $180,000.

The Mimecast system filters the e-mails before they hit Hook's local Microsoft e-mail system. It also provides an archiving function for any legitimate messages. The teaching hospital opted to archive all e-mails, in part due to the litigious nature of modern society. "We hear more and more about e-discovery," Hook says. Now, in case Hook needs to retrieve a deleted e-mail, he can use a search engine function on Mimecast that greatly streamlines the effort, he says.

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