Case Study - Taiwan YAMAHA Motor

Company: Taiwan YAMAHA Motor
Location: Taiwan
Industry: Information Management
Number of mailboxes: 700 mailboxes/users
Products in use: GFI WebMonitor™ WebSecurity edition

Quick Read

Taiwan YAMAHA Motor uses Microsoft ISA Server GFI WebMonitor antivirus gateway technology to secure its network.

Yamaha Motor Taiwan Co. Ltd, which forms part of the worldwide YAMAHA group operation, required a solution that worked seamlessly with Microsoft ISA Server to prevent their computer networks from being infected with viruses and malicious material downloaded from the Internet. After evaluating a number of products on the market, Yamaha chose GFI WebMonitor WebSecurity edition for its performance, user-friendly management console and reporting capabilities.

Challenges

Yamaha Motor Taiwan Co. Ltd is involved in the manufacture and sales of motorcycles, scooters, water vehicles, outboard motors, diesel engines, multi-purpose engines and myriad other technologies.

A few years ago, YAMAHA Motor allowed employees unrestricted use of their personal computers. At the time, the company's internal network relied on an IP management method and only the main computers were connected to the internet. No individual passwords were assigned to staff and some computers had both single and shared users. Since it was impossible to monitor employees' access to the main computers, some individuals breached the company's IT security rights by entering the office late at night to surf the web. After these rogue users went online using the company's main computers, they changed the IP addresses, with the result that the computer network experienced unexpected glitches. However, these culprits could not be traced by the IT department as no passwords were assigned to monitor employee login behaviour.

To address this problem, the company installed firewall software without any integration with Active Directory (AD), so the company could only rely on the IP management function to monitor employees' computing behaviour.

The company felt the need for a more robust solution. After three years of evaluating the pros and cons of hardware or software-based firewall packages and testing them in different environments, YAMAHA Motors decided to purchase a software-based firewall that has an external mail server and web browser which shares the same network pathways, while applying for another network line specifically for web browsing activities, with Microsoft ISA Server connected with this line, to increase the level of IP authentication security control when Active Directory (AD) is used to control individual password access.

Implementation

As email was rapidly becoming a mission critical application for Aegisoft, they decided that a complete overhaul of their Exchange environment was necessary.

“We decided to migrate to a multi server exchange 2007 environment with the mailbox servers clustered on a SAN for increased storage capacity. We also introduced GFI MailArchiver to archive all incoming and outgoing email to a secondary SQL server also on the SAN,” Mr. Laskowski said.

He added that this gave them immediate capacity to turn on aggressive Exchange email retention and deletion rules, thus keeping the size of the Exchange Information Store to a manageable size and, by extension, daily backups to a much shorter timeframe, while simultaneously ensuring that all email is accessible from the GFI system if access to it is needed for any reason at all.

After choosing GFI MailArchiver, getting the software up and running was a breeze. Mr. Laskowski said: “Installation was extremely simple which primarily consisted of pointing it to an appropriate SQL database, Exchange mailbox store, and Exchange journal account and you’re good to go. An option after install that we elected to pursue was to import all existing email from users’ mailboxes into the GFI MailArchiver system.”

Benefits

For a few years after the deployment of Microsoft ISA Server, the installed antivirus software was enough to stop viruses but the company then started to notice an increase in the number of viruses due to the growing number of phishing sites and websites that were being hijacked or infected with virus code or malware.

"When we decided on our Microsoft ISA Server antivirus engine, our main purpose was to prevent our computer networks from being infected with viruses downloaded while browsing sites infected with malicious payloads, and it was important to have 2 to 3 layers of antivirus protection installed on our mail server, client ports and server ports," said YAMAHA Group Demeng Information Management Consultant Mr. Yao Chen. "Last year, YAMAHA Corporation's Japanese head office started paying more attention to the area of information security when the company implemented a worldwide information security audit on their entire network."

YAMAHA's information technology department decided to source the most suitable antivirus software that could integrate well with Microsoft ISA Server. Three products were shortlisted, including GFI WebMonitor.

"GFI WebMonitor was eventually chosen as the right software to purchase because of its higher performance when integrated with Microsoft ISA Server, and its user-friendly management console and reporting capabilities. YAMAHA Motor IT employees were also satisfied with GFI WebMonitor because of its triple layer antivirus defense that showed a higher rate of virus interception than other software products. Its antivirus engines also lived up to expectations because there was a 100% detection rate of virus-infected websites in the course of testing the product," Mr Chen explained.

Benefits

YAMAHA IT personnel realized that as part of a massive manufacturing industry, only around 200 employees actually required internet connectivity at work. YAMAHA decided that only they should be given privileged access to the internet and by using GFI WebMonitor the company was able to limit access to specific government websites and the main search engines.

This allowed the company to provide internet connectivity to a select group of employees, to monitor their activity and to access to a restricted list of websites, and peace of mind that a safety net was in place to prevent any viruses or malicious payload from entering the company's network.

Target Reached

GFI MailArchiver provided all the functionality they required to archive all incoming and outgoing mail while keeping their Exchange Information Store file sizes to a manageable level. Although the company had tried another two solutions – Symantec Enterprise Vault and CA Assentor – Mr. Laskowski said: “GFI gave us the feature set that we were looking for at the greatest value by far. It is a cost-effective solution and it has saved us operational time.”

Links

For more information about GFI WebMonitor Click Here.

^{April 2008}