Case Study: Health System Keeps Spam Email Out, Patient Data In

Across six major hospitals, the 10,000 email users of Hamilton Health Sciences account for a considerable message volume. Most of it is unwanted. The staff of this leading health system in Hamilton, Ontario has extraordinary medical expertise, but many are far less sophisticated when it comes to safe email practices. The IT team needed an email security system that could accurately block a high volume of spam messages, reduce the risk of patient-data leakage and offer straight-forward, practical management. They found the ideal solution in an Extensible Content Security (XCS) system from WatchGuard.

The WatchGuard XCS appliance replicated much of the older system's filtering, making the latter system redundant. The team swapped out the old system for a pair of WatchGuard XCS systems (known as BSP800 systems at the time, roughly performance-equivalent to current XCS 970 models). The two are configured as a failover pair, processing bi-directional email traffic for all six main hospitals, a major cancer center, and multiple clinical sites. Running WatchGuard Reputation Authority, inbound and outbound content filtering and email antivirus, the solution protects against spam messages besieging users, malware penetrating the network, and confidential patient data leaving in outbound emails.