The Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust ensures health of its email system with Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway.

Imperial College Healthcare’s email falls ill to slew of viruses.

The Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust was founded on 1st October, 2007 by merging the Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust, St Marys NHS Trust and the integration of the Imperial College London Faculty of Medicine. Today, the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is the largest NHS Trust in the country and is also the UK’s first academic health science centre (AHSC). The AHSC is a major step forward in patient care, clinical teaching and scientific invention and innovation.

The Trust is used to being on the cutting edge of curing illness, and is renowned for its specialised services and research, including head trauma treatment, cancer treatment and maternity services. However, with over 10,000 email users, the Trust found it was encountering something it could not cure on its own, namely a slew of dangerous viruses – computer viruses.

“We had a great deal of instability in our email system because of the high volume of viruses that were getting into our organisation,” said Stuart Powers, Service Delivery Manager for Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. “Unfortunately, the various anti-virus solutions we implemented over the years could not keep up with constantly evolving virus threats.”

The Trust also noticed a large increase in the amount of spam that its employees received, which amounted to thousands of messages each week. A large percentage of the spam was obscene, and the Trust felt it had an obligation to protect its employees from such offensive material.

Proofpoint provides spam and virus antidote

After conducting an extensive review of anti-spam and anti-virus solutions, the Trust purchased the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway, a secure, hardened appliance that uses Proofpoint MLX™ machine learning technology to provide unrivalled effectiveness against inbound spam and viruses.

“What stood out for us about Proofpoint was that the appliance was not only extremely reliable and effective, but it was also incredibly easy to manage,” said Stuart Powers, Service Delivery Manager for Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust. “We only have a few people on our support team, so ease of use was a critical feature. It was extremely surprising how simple Proofpoint was to install and manage.”

Proofpoint MLX technology accurately eliminates spam by examining more than 500,000 structural and content attributes in every message, automatically adapting to address new threats.

As part of its appliance deployment, the Trust also uses the Proofpoint Virus Protection™ module, which uses industry-leading anti-virus technology from F-Secure to provide comprehensive defence against all types of viruses, trojans and other forms of malicious code right at the gateway.

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust needed an adaptable anti-spam solution

As a medical institution, many of the Trust’s emails contain terms that are acceptable in the medical field, but are often the topic of unsolicited emails, such as pharmaceutical spam. Many anti-spam technologies would automatically block these emails based on the language, but but Stuart Powers says the Proofpoint technology is more adept at dealing with these messages.

“We have been able to tweak the offensive language dictionaries to define what we consider acceptable and unacceptable terms,” said Powers. “Proofpoint has been very successful thus far at distinguishing between acceptable medical language and spam, with negligible false positives.”

In the future, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust is looking to implement Proofpoint to cleanse its outbound email as well to prevent sensitive information from being disseminated outside the institution and to comply with future privacy and data protection regulations. Stuart Powers says the UK is moving towards implementing regulations, much like HIPAA in the United States.

“Proofpoint gives us the ability to quickly add on modules to our existing implementation,” said Powers. “Proofpoint has worked so well at eliminating thousands of unsolicited messages from our incoming stream of email, so we’re looking forward to seeing it cleanse our outbound email as well.”

Solution

Business challenge

The Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London noticed a dramatic increase in the amount of spam and viruses its employees

were receiving. The hospital system felt an obligation to protect its employees from obscene content and harmful viruses. The Trust had tried a variety of anti-spam and anti-virus solutions, but none of these solutions had the ability to adapt to new and emerging threats. The hospital system needed a new way to protect its email that would be more effective and reliable than previous solutions.

Proofpoint solution

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust selected the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway™ appliance to protect 10,000 employee mailboxes from offensive material.

Results achieved

The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway went to work right away and is currently eliminating thousands of spam and viruses each week from the Trust’s email system, with near-perfect accuracy and a negligible level of false positives.

About

About Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust

Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust was formed on October 1 2007, when Hammersmith Hospitals NHS Trust and St Mary’s NHS Trust merged and integrated with Imperial College London, forming the UK’s first academic health science centre (AHSC).

The Trust is also one of only five generic biomedical research centres (BRCs) in the UK. They were awarded this status by the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) in recognition of their excellence in translational and clinical research.

Imperial College London has a campus on all main sites and is increasingly integrated with all our clinical specialties. The Clinical Sciences Centre of the Medical Research Council (MRC) is also based at Hammersmith Hospital, providing a strong foundation for clinical and scientific research.

About Proofpoint, Inc.

Proofpoint provides messaging security solutions for large enterprises to stop spam, protect against email viruses and ensure compliance with corporate policies and regulations through their messaging infrastructure. The company’s flagship products, the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway™ and Proofpoint Protection Server® provide future-proof messaging security using Proofpoint MLX™ technology, an advanced machine learning system developed by Proofpoint scientists and engineers.