ANTI-SPAMMING & SPYWARE SOLUTIONS

The quantity of unsolicited e-mail has increased dramatically. Frequently, content is inappropriate, productivity is lost and bandwidth is taken up, thus costing your organization money.

There are many e-mail filtering products on the market. It is difficult to find products that reduce SPAM without first talking to someone with technical expertise. PC Professional can help you choose anti-spamming products and develop anti-spamming solutions that will benefit your company and support your system.

PC Professional has researched, evaluated and implemented numerous anti-spamming products that effectively reduce the number of undesired and inappropriate messages cluttering e-mail inboxes. We can recommend one for your company based on number of users, e-mail platform and cost.

PRODUCT OPTIONS

Barracuda Networks

Established in 2002, Barracuda Networks has emerged as a leading provider of spam firewall solution for enhancing email protection to businesses of all sizes. Headquartered in Mountain View, California, the company's mission is to provide powerful, enterprise-class solutions that are suitable for the largest of businesses yet have the ease of use and affordability that smaller businesses demand.

Recently, Barracuda approached PC Professional to become a dedicated partner and participate in their reseller program. We are proud to engage with Barracuda and will work on building a strong and lasting relationship. We will also focus on delivering powerful, easy-to-use, affordable spam, spyware, and virus protection solutions to our clients.

In early July 2006, PC Professional installed Barracuda's two main products in our network, Barracuda Spam Firewall and Spyware Firewall.

Barracuda Spam Firewall - Because of the ever increasing resources that are needed to run Microsoft Exchange Services and the fact that Anti-Virus software is already adding to the demand for these resources, PC Professional thought it was imperative to find a SMB Anti-Spam solution that was device driven. By implementing Anti-Spam on a device that was separate from the Exchange server, we felt that the increased productivity gains with email would be invaluable. Barracuda's spam firewall protects workstations and servers from downloading malicious code such as viruses, worms, logic bombs, rabbits, and Trojan horses. In addition, it will provide URL filtering to increase efficiency in web traffic.

Barracuda Spyware Firewall - Most anti-spyware is software driven. In fact, it is almost always installed directly on an individuals PC and places a burden on the individual end user to decide when to run anti-spyware and when to update the software. When a LAN Admin wanted to verify this was occurring, the overhead was immense. By placing the Anti-Spyware burden on a device driven solution, the overhead and user interaction was basically eliminated. The added benefit is that the Barracuda Anti- Spyware Firewall also has some basic web browsing functions which makes a cost effective addition to most clients' issues of un-authorized internet usage. While the Spam Firewall protects you from malicious codes, the Spyware Firewall filters inbound mail from Spam, it provides mail anti-virus, and reports user activity.

Charles Stone, Vice President of IS stated, "The Barracuda anti-spam and spyware firewalls have performed well since its installation in PC Professional's network and I have had a good experience with both of the solutions." Chas reported that the anti-spam firewall has significantly reduced our incoming spam that end-users have to deal with. We previously were running a server based spam filter on our Exchange server. With the introduction of the anti-spam firewall, I was able to remove the spam software resulting in increased performance. The spyware firewall solution was transparent to our users. The device incorporates inbound filtering of spyware, worms, and viruses with URL filtering for internal users. These two filtering capabilities reduce the probability of a users downloading malicious code on to a desktop from a website. The URL filtering prevents users from accessing inappropriate sites.

Dan Sanguinetti, CEO/President has also been satisfied with Barracuda: "After implementing the Barracuda solutions, I was surprised to find that the quantity of spam hitting my personal email box was down about 60%. This has had a huge productivity increase with regards to the amount of spam that I needed to spend time sorting through. The same hold's true for my employees. I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that the Barracuda spyware box had URL web browsing blockage capabilities which has allowed me to rest easy and not worry about what the PC Professional employees are looking at on the Internet."

To contact PC Professional please call 510.465.5700
or e-mail support@pcprofessional.com.