Government Agency: City of Seattle

Solution or Platform Selected: Google Message Security, powered by Postini

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   Seattle, Washington is one of the most technologically savvy cities in the nation. It was one of the first to create and host a website, and so doing, open itself up to security threats. The Public Records Act only exacerbated the problem. Says Michael Hamilton, Chief Information Security Officer for the City of Seattle, “It’s a well-known fact that address harvesting bots move around the Internet all the time and, because we’re required to expose our contact information online, our email addresses are available for anyone to see and use for spam purposes.” The address harvesting bots were sending an ever-greater volume of spam to city email addresses – and the city’s existing spam protection solution wasn’t catching the illegitimate messages. “Quite a bit of spam was eluding the solution and making it to our users’ inboxes. We were at 80 to 90 percent unwanted email,” recalls Hamilton. “All departments in the city government – with more than 11,000 users throughout downtown Seattle – were centrally served by our old spam protection solution and, frankly, it was a huge security risk and a significant productivity drain. We knew we had to make a change.”



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   After evaluating a variety of approaches, including updated appliances similar to the city’s existing solution as well as managed services hosted by a third-party provider, Hamilton realized the labor and energy benefits of an on-demand, hosted service approach would be the right direction for the city. “With an outsourced spam filtering solution, we could protect our users from spam without increasing employee overhead – and reduce our overall energy consumption by decommissioning the existing servers.” Hamilton then conducted extensive research on the top two managed spam filtering services and, to his delight, found that Google Message Security, powered by Postini, was on the General Services Administration (GSA) Schedule. Purchasing Google through a GSA distributor, Hamilton then set about implementing the solution across the wide variety of city departments – from public works personnel to elected officials. “We phased the rollout over nine months with quite a bit of handholding,” says Hamilton. “In local government, it’s critically important to implement new technology with a lot of communication to each individual department to make the transition as smooth as possible.”



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   Thanks to Google Message Security, the City of Seattle has increased security and reduced its ‘threat surface’. In real productivity terms, Hamilton estimates his time savings in this way: “If you have 10,000 users that spend a few minutes per day going through their email inboxes and cleaning out spam that’s either marked or unmarked as spam but made it past the filter anyway, you get about several hundred hours a day. When you take an average hourly pay rate and calculate out the lost productivity in dollar terms, it’s a big number. And that’s what we’re saving by using Google – the daily digests reduce those few minutes to five seconds.” Finally, with the on-demand, hosted approach of Google, the City of Seattle has been able to reduce its energy footprint. Comments Hamilton, “We have decreased the number of servers we have running in the data center because Google hosts the application for us. The success of the outsourced model in general – and Google Message Security in particular – has led us to evaluate hosted applications to meet our other IT requirements.”