Customer background

Country State is one of Sydney’s most reputable and well regarded property development companies. Incorporated in 1992, they have since been helping Sydney-siders see the potential of investing in property. With developments such as high-rises, residential buildings, hotel suites and developments such as Glebe Gardens, they have come to prove to be leaders that produce unique concepts that meet their client’s needs.

Customer Challenge

After some discussion with Country State, we discovered that they were receiving high volumes of spam to their inbox and legitimate emails were going to their junk folders. The large amounts of spam was filling their local server disk space making it non responsive. Their emails could take up to 10 minutes to send due to the local internet speed dropping from the strain to the server. The emails that Country State were sending to their clients were incorrectly being classified as spam as their server was infected and was sending spam out to their contacts without their consent. This was a significant issue as they were not able to communicate with their customers with certainty. Because of this, their staff spent time chasing lost emails with clients to make sure they had not been categorized as junk. These issues were taking away time the staff should have been spending on more important tasks. After some further investigation we found that the antivirus software was not effective in stopping the spam and the management of the server and antivirus was costing them more time of their staff and money for upkeep.

Solution

After some consideration we recommended that they move to Office 365 to solve these issues. Country State were concerned that their data would be on the cloud and this may lead to security issues. To ease their minds, we provided them with the O365 security certificates and suggested a manual migration to O365 as there were five users. After moving them to the cloud, all spam ceased immediately. This was due to O365’s fraud protection which was able to stop mass amounts of spam. This in turn significantly improved their internet speed and the strain on their server. They were pleasantly surprised to see such a sudden change. After the migration, their domain was no longer sending spam to their contacts. As all packets were being sent through Microsoft servers, this allowed Microsoft to filter the packets and stop the issue of spam broadcasting. After a short period of time their domain returned to a trusted zone. Emails that were sent to customers were no longer being sent to junk folders. This freed up the employee’s time from chasing emails to spending time on more productive tasks. As packets were being sent directly to Microsoft servers to be processed, there was no longer any delay in sending emails.

Measurable Benefits

• Costs saved on antivirus
• SSL certificates no longer needed
• Less money on technical support
• Less money on server maintenance
• Less time spent chasing emails
• Storage space was reduced to 0
• IT Hardware costs were reduced
• Always using the newest version of software for both client and server sites with no need to upgrade