"We need to be proactive in addressing the goals of the organisation and focus our efforts in this area. An outsourced solution was a clear choice."

In the 1960s the Zoo’s great modernisation program began, the Lion Park being the first major exhibit. In the 1980s a master plan divided the Zoo into bioclimatic zones.

Today, the Zoo seeks to meet four objectives: active regional conservation and research programs; education programs, which involves over 100,000 participants yearly; local conservation programs – including Eastern Barred Bandicoot and Helmeted Honeyeater and internationally, the Zoo is involved with projects in Vietnam, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines.

With 270 staff across the Zoo’s three geographic sites and individual users spread across more than 20 distributed gamekeeper workplaces in the parks and the three main park offices, the challenge of maintaining a safe, secure communications environment requires more than fences and physical barriers to ensure effective communications at Melbourne Zoo.

The Zoo recognised the increasing threat of virus attacks on the organisation’s distributed communications network after experiencing intrusion (and the resulting negative impact on the Zoo’s communications) by the Kournikova virus during several high profile public outbreaks.

An increasing awareness of the commercial dependence on the Zoo’s intellectual property, information systems and a growing need to protect significant intellectual property from unauthorised distribution, led Paul Bamford, IT Manager, to urgently assess the options available to secure the Zoo’s information environment.

As Bamford notes, “With limited IT staff we could not afford to address this critical issue in ongoing reactive mode. We determined that our focus as an IT function needed to be on the development and roll-out of the Zoo’s new applications and infrastructure – especially the new multi-media public displays. We need to be proactive in addressing the goals of the organisation and focus our efforts in this area. An outsourced solution was a clear choice.”

MailGuard, Australia’s first and leading provider of managed email anti-virus and content filtering solutions was selected after a detailed evaluation of other offerings. A long and successful business partnership commenced in late 2001. “MailGuard provides the right balance of unrivalled security and filtering functionality with the transparent and continuous upgrades that we were looking for. Users no longer experience the frustration of SPAM, congested networks from large, uncontrolled attachments and the fear of viral outbreak.”

Email policies and statistics and a more efficient utilisation of data storage are other important management outcomes from the MailGuard service. For example, email with large attachments are now limited freeing up bandwidth and speeding up the network. MailGuard’s service also assists the Zoo with meeting its privacy compliance requirements and automates corporate disclaimers.

With confidence in the comprehensive protection in the background, Bamford and his team now focus on delivering value to the organisation through new initiatives.

“As a result, information technology is now considered by the Zoo to be more strategic,” said Bamford. Bamford sees the partnership with MailGuard more like an extension to his team. The close cooperation between the two organisations in the design and testing of new services provides confidence to Bamford that “we will always remain ahead of the threats and disruption facing other organisations.” As a result of the strong relationship between the two organisations, and the Zoo’s immediate needs, the Melbourne Zoo is piloting MailGuard’s WebGuard – which filters, protects and manages Web usage. Bamford is also, currently, investigating archiving services from MailGuard to ease the burden of email management as well as providing redundancy and data security for critical information.