SMX expels spam for Westlake Boys High School

SMX’s cloud-based anti-spam and anti-virus solution has simplified email security and reduced spam to ‘near zero’ at Westlake Boys High School. New Era IT, Westlake’s external ICT support provider has selected SMX to further improve their operational efficiency around email security as well as offering extra layers of redundancy for the school in the event of a disaster.

Westlake Boys High School (Westlake) is a large state secondary school on Auckland’s North Shore managing the typical constraints in education of tight budgets and limited staff to deal with ICT. 

Westlake had been using an onsite email filtering solution from Symantec that had worked reasonably well, however spam and false positive classifications were still a problem; spam was still going into staff members’ junk mail folders each week and important legitimate emails were being misclassified as spam (false positives).

"SMX committed to reduce our spam to near zero and we have been impressed with the results,” says Alex Reed, Associate Headmaster at Westlake Boys High School. “I haven’t seen a single email in my junk mail folder for several weeks since we started using the SMX service."

"Our support team doesn’t have to review the quarantine folder anymore because thanks to the accuracy of the SMX service, they simply don't have a requirement for a quarantine function," says Reed. 

Westlake’s ICT support is provided by nationwide specialist education technology company, New Era IT. The SMX solution was identified as the best practice to fit with the New Era IT model.

New Era IT can now view the SMX management portal whilst onsite at Westlake and also remotely from any other location.  

"Having a single consistent view of the SMX portal anywhere, anytime, makes supporting schools more efficient. This ensures schools squeeze maximum value from every support dollar," says Dave Gray, Operations Manager at New Era IT.

"SMX can also view the portal, so we can quickly escalate any queries to their support team and know they are instantly seeing the same information," says Gray.

Peace of mind

The disaster recovery support and redundancy provided by the SMX solution simply gives Westlake ‘peace of mind.’ The SMX system operates from multiple remote datacentres, providing a new layer of redundancy for Westlake in the event of any form of disaster.  If the mail server goes offline for any reason, SMX automatically queues the email and can provide hosted email boxes to ensure Westlake can be operational with email as quickly as possible after a disaster. 

"SMX said they would reduce our spam and give us a new layer of redundancy and disaster recovery – and they did.  The reduction in spam was immediately noticeable," says Alex Reed.

Westlake Boys High School is just one of the early adopters of SMX’s cloud-based email security solution. There are a number of equivalent large schools currently using the SMX solution. With the national rollout of Ultra Fast Broadband into schools to empower staff and students with more ubiquitous and broader internet access, digital security is becoming an increasingly important necessity for all shareholders. Together with New Era IT, SMX is giving more schools ‘peace of mind.’