Government Agency: City of Monroe, Washington

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

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   Tucked in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains east of Seattle, the City of Monroe, Washington is the center of commerce for Eastern Snohomish County and used to be home to the Carnation Dairy. All told, the city has 110 government employees, including public works, law enforcement, and all the departments within City Hall, for which it provides IT services and support, including email. In addition, the city also provides email accounts for approximately 20 city council members and other elected officials. In late 2003, a virtual deluge of spam was nearly paralyzing the city’s servers. Recalls Denise Bremner, IT Manager for the City of Monroe, “From the minute we published our employees’ email addresses on our website, the volume of spam hitting our servers – and reaching our users’ inboxes – became unbearable. We were just bombarded. We were using a spam filtering system at the server level, however, quite a bit of spam was still getting through. At that point, we realized we had to do something else.”



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   Because the city's IT department is small, ease of management and use was at the top of Bremner’s list of evaluation criteria for a spam filtering solution. “Initially, we looked at some appliances, but, at the time, we only had two people in the IT department,” says Bremner. “We needed something we wouldn’t have to worry about and that would stop the spam from hanging our email servers. So we decided to look at managed services.” Bremner selected Google Message Security. “Our primary goal was to screen emails before they hit our server and eliminate potential viruses and spam from our network. Google Message Security seemed like a good fit for our needs and it has proven us right.” Bremner was so pleased that she turned to Google again in late 2007 when she faced email archiving challenges. “Much of our email is subject to public disclosure requests. Everything we send on email is a matter of public record,” notes Bremner. “We heard that Google provided a message archiving system that would help us centralize our messages in one place and be much faster to search, so we decided to upgrade to Google Message Discovery and we couldn’t be happier."



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   Bremner can capture all email required to meet a public disclosure request in a fraction of the time it used to take. “In the past, when someone filled out a disclosure request asking for all emails from, for example, a specific staff member to a city council member, we had to manually search multiple email servers and archives, which is very time-consuming,” notes Bremner. “Now, all we have to do is run a quick search with the specific criteria. With Google Message Discovery, a request for public disclosure that previously would have taken days to meet now takes a matter of minutes.” Bremner likes the fact that her staff can configure settings for different groups of users. “With the different constituents that we serve – we need to be able to customize the Google service for each user, and we need to do it quickly and easily.” Bremner views the Google Apps security and compliance services as one of the best IT investments she has made in the past few years. “Between filtering out all the spam we used to get and helping us respond more quickly to disclosure requests, Google saves us a lot of time and money.”