“It was easy to implement and, within one day, the benefits were obvious,” said Salomonsz. “Today, the amount of spam received is virtually negligible unlike our previous solution. Now with MailGuard, our firewall and desktop antivirus software I feel we are completely protected.” Alfons Salomonsz
Australian IT,
Manager for Porsche.

As Porsche’s first right hand drive market and one of its first export territories in 1951, Australia has enjoyed a very close relationship with the factory.

When the first cars were imported by Norman Hamilton in 1951, less than two Porsches a year were sold in Australia. Now more than 50 years later, Porsche Cars Australia is a wholly owned subsidiary of Porsche AG, responsible for annual sales of more than 1,300 cars a year from its new Melbourne national headquarters which opened in 1998.

Alfons Salomonsz, Australian IT Manager for Porsche, maintains that the company’s heritage for uncompromising quality, innovation and associated emotion needs to also be reflected in its business practices. An important ingredient of Porsche’s success in Australia has been its long-term relationship with and care of its customers.

He forms a small team of two servicing the needs of Porsche Australia’s 55 users. “We are and have always been very conscious of the vulnerability of networks in dealing with both viruses and spam. We have been meticulous in our attempts to stop viruses and spam email before they get into our internal systems,” said Salomonsz.

The impact of a virus is not only damaging internally, disrupting normal daily activity as well as corrupting company data but email borne viruses mean that one of Porsche’s users could infect the networks of its customers, dealers or suppliers.

“We must be seen to be keeping on top of security issues that viruses and spam present to us as an organisation and to those with whom we communicate electronically,” said Salomonsz.

Having implemented a software solution in 2002, Salomonsz was finding the management of his anti-spam and anti-virus software becoming more demanding and time consuming. With security issues on the increase the upgrades and patches, required to ensure protection against the latest virus and spam threats, were also increasing.

There was an ongoing need to install new software on the mail server, configure user filter settings and policies, including mail relay. “The routine management was becoming onerous and I had a constant fear that all we needed was to miss one update by 24 hours and we would suffer a company wide virus or spam attack resulting in downtime and possible data loss. On one occasion a virus did enter the network resulting in a two hour system outage for all users.

All this lead Salomonsz to implement the MailGuard email management service 12 months ago. “MailGuard diligently works in the background filtering every email that comes into and out of the Porsche network. With MailGuard’s managed antivirus solution being updated constantly, I can be more relaxed about security threats these days as well as being freed up to focus on the day to day IT management issues of the company and be proactive with regard to project work,” said Salomonsz.

However, Salomonsz has enjoyed other benefits with the MailGuard implementation. The company pays less for its email management and security. It has no need for hardware or software. The server required for the previous solution has been deployed for data storage with the bonus of reduced Microsoft licencing costs and server maintenance demands.

“It was easy to implement and, within one day, the benefits were obvious,” said Salomonsz. “Today, the amount of spam received is virtually negligible unlike our previous solution. Now with MailGuard, our firewall and desktop antivirus software I feel we are completely protected.”

MailGuard’s weekly and monthly reports have also delivered another plus to Salomonsz in managing user expectations.

Salomonsz calculates that the company is utilising one third less storage disk space and the reduced amount of traffic flowing in and out of its network results in lower data communications costs.

“I could not speak more highly about MailGuard as a reliable service provider. Its email management solution really is a simple and comprehensive solution for us to rid ourselves of junk mail clogging our servers and wasting our users’ time, deleting viruses well before they enter our network on a 24x7 basis, preventing system downtime and saving operational costs with regard to data traffic and storage needs,” concluded Salomonsz.

Alfons Salomonsz
Australian IT, Manager for Porsche.