Lindsay Australia, a leader in integrated transport and logistics, enters a new era of email protection with Barracuda.
Drive on any road or highway in Australia and chances are you will see the striking fire-engine red livery of Lindsay Australia trucks as they haul trailers of essential goods to markets and distribution centers nationwide.
Founded in 1953 and listed on the Australian Securities Exchange, Lindsay Australia is a leader in integrated transport, logistics and rural supply, servicing customers in the food processing, food services, rural and horticultural sectors.
Responsible for the technology infrastructure and cybersecurity for 1,400 employees in 36 locations involving 48 core applications and 385 endpoints, Robert Hodgkiss, IT Infrastructure Manager at Lindsay Australia, said: “We receive an average 300,000 to 450,000 inbound emails a month and send thousands of outbound messages on logistical data and other correspondence.
“Unfortunately, the legacy email protection we had in place was unable to cope evidenced by the upswing of spam and other threats. We were having to manually inspect suspicious messages placing a severe strain on IT resources.”
This caused significant problems for employees who were regularly receiving unsolicited, unchecked and often malicious messages with harmful content or intent. Of course, there was always the worst-case scenario lurking in the back of Hodgkiss’ mind; that of an unseen attacker hidden within the network.
“I’m sure what we had in place did work at one time. But, as threats intensified and became more sophisticated, the solution designed to protect the network was overwhelmed,” he said.
“The system was bandwidth hungry, there was low threat visibility, spam appeared frequently, and to cap it all, a complex double filtering process with on-premises data archiving resulted in high network utilization.”
As Hodgkiss succinctly puts it: “The situation was a mess, unattainable and had to change.”
Barracuda delivers comprehensive single subscription solution
Following a discussion with senior management, the decision was made to overhaul the email protection system.
“Simplification was key. Rather than multiple vendors supplying pieces of the email protection jigsaw like we had, we wanted one vendor to provide an externally hosted solution under one subscription,” said Hodgkiss.
“This had to include email archiving, spam control, visibility, archiving, backup, reporting and incident management, and security awareness training tools.”
These strict criteria proved to be a stumbling block for all vendors in the selection process, apart from one – Barracuda.
Barracuda takes customer first approach
Entrusted by over 200,000 customers worldwide to safeguard their employees, data and applications from email-borne threats, Barracuda delivers easy, comprehensive and simplified email protection solutions. According to research, 91% of all cyberattacks originate with email and can have a financial and reputational impact and disrupt business.
Hodgkiss deployed Barracuda Email Protection to prevent spam, ransomware, all socially engineered threats including phishing, spear phishing, business email compromise and account takeover attacks.
“Barracuda Email Protection takes a comprehensive, automated approach with email threats detected and remediated within minutes and goes much further than your typical email protection provider,” he said.
Barracuda takes flexible approach
“During the pre-deployment, we extended the subscription to cover Email Gateway Defense and Impersonation Protection,” said Hodgkiss.
“With other IT vendors, additional product means creating a separate contract, but Barracuda enlarged the master contract and retained the single subscription model making everything easy.
“Barracuda’s archiving platform has a full litigation hold meaning if an employee deletes an email by accident or otherwise, the message is retrievable due to cloud synchronization.
“This brings a considerable cost-savings benefit because under the legacy system, the archive mailbox and email exchange storage resided on-premises. With Barracuda, email data is stored off premises and in the cloud, saving considerable storage and maintenance costs.”
Guarding against the possibility of an employee sharing a link internally to a spam website, Barracuda offers link protection. Whenever an employee shares a link inside the network, Barracuda will intercept the email, scan the contents, click through to the website, and if safe, the email is released. If not, the message is blocked and an alert is triggered.
Sitting inside the network, Barracuda Impersonation Protection uses Artificial Intelligence to learn the communications patterns of employees and detects personalized fraud – spear phishing for example – in real time. When a threat is identified, the email is filtered out with zero impact on performance.
Rounding out the solution is Barracuda Security Awareness Training that offers sophisticated security awareness assessment and training on a platform running multi-vector and variable attack simulations with pre-built email templates and landing pages.
“This takes the cybersecurity training to the next level by giving engaging and real-life content to employees,” said Hodgkiss.
“From the performance metrics and detailed reports on user behavior, we can assess security risks and report back to the corporate compliance team.”
Short deployment, long term cost savings
“Deployment took a day and a half thanks to the structured documentation with the Barracuda team on hand to assist,” said Hodgkiss.
“Switchover took less than five minutes with zero downtime. It was easy. In the first month of operation, Barracuda scanned 400,000 inbound emails and removed 14,500 threats, and cut our network traffic and storage utilization by 22%.”
