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Loxam has become the market leader in Europe for the rental of access equipment. The company has more than 540 office locations spread across 10 European countries. The solution Sophos UTM impressed Loxam with its reliability and ease-of-use.

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Miguel Angel Aguilar Moreira
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125 views4 pages

Loxam PDF

Loxam has become the market leader in Europe for the rental of access equipment. The company has more than 540 office locations spread across 10 European countries. The solution Sophos UTM impressed Loxam with its reliability and ease-of-use.

Uploaded by

Miguel Angel Aguilar Moreira
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Loxam, the leading provider of rental equipment, finds a reliable spam management solution with Sophos UTM.

Safe virtualization helps Loxam to optimize their IT environment.


Customer
Loxam

Industry
Rental equipment

Sophos solutions
Two Sophos UTM virtual appliances in an active-active cluster combined with UTM Email Protection

Loxam A customer success story

About the customer


Since the companys foundation in 1967, Loxam has become the market leader in Europe for the rental of access equipment to public authorities, construction firms and industry, always following its motto Partout, pour tous / Everywhere, for all. Loxam has more than 540 office locations spread across 10 European countries and serves more than 200,000 customers. Loxam provides complete solutions to its customer requirements and is the only rental company in Europe capable of supplying a total package of equipment.

The problem More than 93,000 spam emails were finding their way into employees inboxes every day. The heterogeneous network and single-point security solutions led to high expenditure and support costs. This was due to the laborious management and maintenance required to keep the complex systems going. The solution Sophos UTM impressed Loxam with its reliability and ease-of-use, which reduced ongoing management and support requirements. The company chose Sophos UTM virtual appliances as part of its migration of the whole company network into a virtualized environment. The result Sophos UTM has dropped the amount of spam by more than 93%, while operating costs have been cut by 20%. The company has reduced the number of physical devices from 10 to just 2 using virtualization and the allin-one security virtual appliances offered by Sophos.

Loxam A customer success story

 Using Sophos UTM meant we could finally solve the problems caused by an immense load of spam. With the Sophos UTM security appliances and the companys experience in virtualization, we were also able to safely migrate our whole network into a virtual environment. Choosing Sophos UTM was clearly the right decision.
Olivier Hertu, Chief Information Officer, Loxam

Big support costs caused by single point solutions


In the past, you could compare our network to a patchwork quilt, says Olivier Hertu, Chief Information Officer at Loxam. We had many different solutions and devices installed on our network that had grown up over time. Our VPN was OpenSSL, we had a Juniper Firewall and two Symantec anti-spam appliances, on top of the SMTP servers. As the business requirements have changed, the IT team wanted to improve the level of service that we could offer. The current IT infrastructure was holding us back. In total, Loxam ran 10 physical machines to support the email and security systems on the companys network, including the appliances for IT security. One employee was responsible for each security solution, and trained as a specialist for the respective device, creating a team of four. While the companys IT was running well, problems could occur when those specialists were not available for reasons like illness or vacation. Having only one employee who is able to understand the issues with a certain device is not only a risk for business, but it also loads immense pressure on this particular employee, says Hertu.

Spam flood hinders daily work


Beside the troubles caused by their heterogeneous network structure, Loxam faced another difficult problem. Spam management caused the IT department huge headaches. We were literally flooded. Every day around 100,000 emails made it through to the inboxes of the employees, and only 6 or 7,000 were categorized as welcome. My colleagues were plagued with more than 90,000 spam mails a day, says Hertu. The sheer volume of spam not only blocks network resources but also confuses employees and hinders their daily work. So, we desperately needed to reduce the amount that was getting through.

more than just spam management and includes all the features needed for full network, web and email protection. While we started searching for a new solution to overcome our spam problems, we soon realized that Sophos UTM could do much more for us by helping to get rid of the complexity within our network infrastructure. We saw that Sophos UTM would help us to reduce costs and hardware, comments Hertu.

Bringing virtualization and network security together


Loxam decided to implement a Sophos UTM virtual appliance, licensed for use across unlimited IP addresses. The Sophos UTM appliance offers complete network as well as email security to counteract the companys spam problem. The email filter scans inbound and outbound POP3 and SMTP traffic and offers different anti-spam techniques such as Recurrent Pattern Detection, grey-listing, real-time Blackhole Lists, pattern, heuristics, SPF, Bounce Address Tag Validation, URLs and B/W lists, as well as providing comprehensive antivirus.

In search of a new solution


Hertu and his team at Loxam started a selection and decision process to single out a new solution for spam management. Alongside Sophos UTM, the team short-listed solutions from Symantec and Commtouch and put them through a thorough test. At the end of this process, the solution offered by Sophos was chosen due to its high reliability and ease-of-use. What also tipped the scales in favor of Sophos UTM was the fact that all appliances can be implemented as virtual machines. Sophos UTM offers offer

Loxam A customer success story

Loxam A customer success story

The Sophos UTM appliance was installed as an active-active cluster on two identical virtual machines. The machines were connected in parallel to distribute the workload evenly and to increase reliability through redundancy. During the implementation phase, the most important point was the integration of Loxams Lotus Domino and Active Directory into the newly organized IT infrastructure, which went off very smoothly. All our users are managed in Active Directory, says Hertu. It was very important for us to find a solution that can be easily integrated with both Lotus Domino and Active Directory, and Sophos UTM definitively has a big plus here.

and false positives. The personal quarantine reports save a lot of time for the IT team, as we dont have any more calls from colleagues sending us on a search for important emails they suspect to be lost in the spam filters.

Restructuring of IT landscape reduces complexity and costs


Before Loxam started to restructure their IT landscape, they ran more than 10 physical machines. As part of the companys IT consolidation strategy, all its workloads were migrated into a virtual environment, including the security devices. This brought the total number of physical servers down to only two, on which all virtual machines including both Sophos UTM appliances, are run. The implementation of Sophos UTM helped to change the structure of our IT environment, supporting our goal to make it more efficient, commented Hertu. There are very few security solutions out there in the market you can deploy in a virtual environment, that are available for a reasonable price and at the same time easy to manage. Sophos UTM is one of them. Imagine how much room, energy and costs we save just by virtualizing our hardware away. Our cost of operation fell by at least 20%. The change from different specialized security solutions over to Sophos UTM has also simplified how Loxam takes care of monitoring, maintenance and management across IT. Our four specialists for IT security are all

trained on the Sophos UTM appliance, which means that everyone can do everything. If something happens, we can rely on each other to sort the problem out. Its put an end to the days when we could not take any time off without feeling bad about it, which has improved morale within the team.

Our Partner
Founded in 2004, Aprile is now very well established as an Integrator and Service Provider in the field of Computer Engineering. Aprile stands out based on its particular know-how in the fields of infrastructure and uses its expertise and experience to offer different service models adapted to its customers needs, ranging from integration and distribution of hardware and software infrastructure components, end-to-end realization of projects and technical support through to full outsourcing of services such as helpdesk or monitoring. APRILE 113 Avenue Jean-Baptiste Clment 92 100 Boulogne-Billancourt Tel +33 1 80 87 53 70 Fax +33 1 80 87 53 71 [email protected] www.aprile.fr

Successfully defending against spam


When we started searching for a new solution, it was one of our priorities to reduce the amount of spam that was coming through to users, explains Hertu. Following the installation of Sophos UTM, we can see the volume of spam has been cut dramatically. While the old solution accepted around 100,000 emails per day, out of which 93,000 were to be classified as spam, the Sophos UTM appliance accepts only 25,000 emails per day. 19,000 of these mails are placed into quarantine, so that only 6,000 emails find their way into the inboxes of the employees. To sort the quarantine lists, every single user is automatically sent a personal quarantine report and can decide which emails they wish to receive, which prevents issues with mails not being categorized properly

United Kingdom Sales: Tel: +44 (0)8447 671131 Email: [email protected]

North American Sales: Toll Free: 1-866-866-2802 Email: [email protected]

Australia & New Zealand Sales Tel: +61 2 9409 9100 Email: [email protected]

Boston, USA| Oxford, UK Copyright 2012. Sophos Ltd. All rights reserved. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Sophos Customer Success Story 10.03v1.dEN

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