InteliTarget Case Study

View the InteliTarget Case Study (683 KB)

Overview

At Washington, D.C.-based InteliTarget, e-mail is a critical element of the outsourced sales services the company provides. From communication with sales prospects to e-mail marketing campaigns, InteliTarget uses multiple e-mail domains to transmit its message. And with high-profile accounts, InteliTarget can't afford downtime from virus outbreaks. Yet recently, unsuspecting users within the corporate network unleashed viruses that damaged machines, consumed network bandwidth, and impeded other employees from sending or receiving messages. Once Avinti's iSolation Server was on the network, it stopped virus outbreaks at InteliTarget by quarantining malicious e-mail before the messages reached unsuspecting users.

Unintentional virus propagation

InteliTarget's sales representatives use e-mail accounts across multiple domains so that they appear to be part of their client's inside sales force. In doing so, unsuspecting users were bombarded by the the Klez virus last year, which they accidentally unleashed into the company by opening malicious e-mail or viewing the contents of the message in the preview pane. The result was disastrous. "We had to determine if the virus was inside at all and then manually clean and rebuild each machine," said Dave Cassee, Director of Finance. Subsequent propagation of the e-mail affected the company's bandwidth capacity and ability to detect and discover the outbreak on individual machines.

Workflow delay

Perhaps the most significant damage unsuspecting users caused by opening malicious e-mail with new and unknown viruses was the significant delay in InteliTarget's workflow. As the virus infected individual workstations, it did one of two things:

1. Locked the system, forcing users to halt their workflow and attempt to reboot, or
2. Forced employees to avoid using e-mail for the rest of the day.

Employees returning to their e-mail accounts the next day found themselves with an overwhelming amount of e-mail to manage and sift through, according to Cassee.

Isolate & quarantine at the network edge

iSolation Server, once on InteliTarget's network, quarantined malicious e-mail with new and unknown viruses at the network edge and kept them far away from where users could accidentally open them. In fact, when viral e-mail messages with a convincing spoofed address flooded InteliTarget's servers, Cassee didn't have to worry about his users opening them — he simply checked iSolation Server's blocked mail page to see that the software had already quarantined them.

Previously, the company used a desktop AV product that required the virus to enter the client machine before it identified and removed it. Desktop AV burdened administrators with tedious task of maintaining and configuring individual desktop clients to ensure AV security. Luckily, Cassee found the iSolation Server. "Eventually we had to get something else. In terms of corporate protection, iSolation Server is the solution," he said.