Orascom Telecom blocks spam with Fortinet

OTH chose the FortiMail appliance for its superior accuracy rates and unique configuration options including high availability (HA), shared quarantine and transparent mode.

With more than 80 million subscribers as of March 31st, 2009, OTH is among the largest and most diversified network operators in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. At OTH, all the information exchanged between the corporate headquarters and OTH subsidiaries and vendors is communicated by email. Email is therefore a mission-critical business application on which all corporate employees and executives rely. Unfortunately, the previous third-party security software installed on the Exchange servers could not cope with the high amount of spam received everyday and soon turned out to be ineffective both in terms of robustness and accuracy.

After a comparative evaluation of the main email security solutions available on the market, OTH opted for Fortinet's FortiMail platform for the following reasons: it scored the highest accuracy rate (99.8%); it offered high availability (HA) configuration and shared quarantine for maximum up-time; and it could operate in a transparent mode, limiting the impact on OTH's other network security settings.

"Ninety percent of the 1.5 million daily emails received in our headquarters is spam. It was therefore critical for us to implement an enterprise-class security solution to maintain efficient business communications," said Mina Samir, IT security manager at OTH. "Since we moved to FortiMail, our management and employees have appreciated the huge decrease in the quantity of spam e-mails they receive. From an IT perspective, FortiMail is definitely an enterprise-class email security solution, which provides us with a superior level of protection, reliability, management and reporting."

OTH deployed a cluster of FortiMail-2000A email security systems to filter the entire inbound email traffic going through OTH's corporate servers with minimal downtime. OTH also subscribed to the FortiGuard Antispam and Antivirus Services powered by Fortinet's 24x7 Global Threat Research Team to get automatic and continuous signature updates and ensure its FortiMail platforms are kept up to date to help protect against the latest spam, viruses and spyware.

In addition, OTH uses FortiMail's detailed logging and customized reporting functionalities to get granular information on all malicious emails received, blocked and quarantined. This information is very useful to OTH's IT department, which runs daily reports to get antivirus and antispam event logging, for analyzing the caught spam and learning about the technique they use.

"Spam has an increasingly negative effect on business by impacting corporate resources and reducing employee productivity. In a highly competitive environment such as the telco market, communication efficiency is key. We're very pleased to see that, thanks to the high performance, reliability and flexibility of our FortiMail platform, OTH employees are now virtually spam-free and can concentrate on business again,"

said Patrice Perche, Fortinet's EMEA Vice President.