”Our business relies on email so much because we have so many sites that we have to communicate with...”

Bakers Delight is Australasia’s largest and oldest bakery franchise, established in 1980 as a single bakery in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn. Its founders focus on outstanding product and delightful customer service to meet their 30 year vision to be the most successful retail baker in the world.

As a franchise bakery, Bakers Delight, sells 13.3% of all bread retailed in Australia and 8.5% of all bread sold in New Zealand.

The company has 225 email users dispersed throughout its head office and regional offices, servicing the needs of its six hundred plus franchise's. Today, Bakers Delight uses MailGuard’s outsourced services to manage and filter all users’ incoming and outgoing email.

In late 2003, the severe impact of the Bugbear Worm on Bakers Delight, despite the efforts of its in-house IT department, led information services manager Peter Carrodus to seriously consider outsourcing the organisation’s email filtering processes.

“As an IT department we’re small. We’re a multiskilled group of people and we all have to lend a hand in many different technical areas. Frankly, this is not a particularly good model for security,“ Carrodus maintains.

Carrodus turned to MailGuard to protect the company’s 225 email users in Bakers Delight’s head and regional offices. After a 14 day trial, Bakers Delight became MailGuard’s 300th global customer.

“With virus scares monthly and SPAM on the increase, I now have complete peace of mind that every single user is comprehensively protected from viruses and junk mail 24 hours a day. With MailGuard’s security and filtering systems automatically updated every 10 minutes, we have been virus and SPAM free since adopting the service,” said Carrodus

Carrodus believes email security is a very specialised area that is costly to have in-house. “MailGuard’s service-based model works well for us, delivers comprehensive filtering solutions and, in addition, is actually saving Bakers Delight money in both resources and productivity time,” he says.

Carrodus is now looking to extend that protection to its 600 franchise bakeries. “Our business relies on email so much because we have so many sites that we have to communicate with, both within our regional offices and the bakeries,” Carrodus says. “Though our bakeries handle things well, at the end of the day, they’re in the business of making bread.”

While virus protection has been Carrodus’ numberone priority, he says MailGuard’s SPAM filtering service has more of an impact on day-to-day activities.

“An incredible amount has been stopped and that has certainly been well received by our user population. From an IT point of view, we think it’s great because it’s less garbage in our server logs and less traffic we have to receive,” said Carrodus.

Carrodus believes that, today, unwanted emails (viruses, worms, SPAM, pornography, etc), and email usage is a key concern within all organisations whether there are two or 2,000 users.

MailGuard’s solution has given Bakers Delight the ability to filter certain types of email and flag these for the attention of management. The outsourced solution gives access to comprehensive statistics and reports on customers’ email traffic.

MailGuard clients need make no changes to their email infrastructure. They need only request their ISP to redirect their Domain Email Configuration to MailGuard’s servers, where email is scanned and filtered before being delivered.

While MailGuard’s users can customise and closely monitor antivirus and SPAM filtering via a management console, a third of clients never log onto the console, reveals MailGuard director Andrew Johnson.

“The common thread through our clients is they don’t have a lot of in-house technical skills, or the technical skills they do have in-house are totally focused on moving the business forward,” Johnson says. “They do not see antivirus and email filtering as something they want to be spending hours on daily.“