Industry   Telecommunications   Service Provided   Mirapoint RazorGate® secure messaging solution    Challenge Online security threats  Solution Installation of RazorGate® 500 anti-virus & anti-spam solution for the entire messaging network

Huawei Technologies is the leading next generation telecommunications networks provider now serving 35 of the world's top 50 operators, along with over one billion users worldwide. Huawei has established itself as a strong technology leader in telecommunications with 14 R&D centres in India, the USA, Sweden, Russia and China. As of June 2008, Huawei has over 87,500 employees, with 43% dedicated to R&D. Huawei's products and solutions include wireless products, network products, applications and software, as well as terminals.

The Situation

Today's organisations cannot function properly without a highly reliable email system; this is particularly true for large multinational corporations. IDC Research indicated that over 450 new viruses are discovered every month. Gartner Group estimated that more than 80% of viruses enter the network through email, and the typical infection costs organisations up to US$500,000 per incident. The Radicati Group projected the worldwide cost of spam is US$20.5 billion per year.

Spam and Virus Threats to Messaging Services 

Huawei faced a tough challenge of managing incoming emails as its headquarters had to process more than 4.5 million emails daily (peaking sometimes at 2 billion per day).  Any attacks from spam, viruses, malware, botnets, phishing and zombies intruded through emails would not only hamper their worldwide business communications network, but also endanger critical internal applications and the whole backend systems which damages would be irrecoverable.

Yet, Huawei's messaging security system was not flexible enough to contend with an ever-growing volume of spam, viruses, fraudulent or "phishing" email attacks. Huawei wanted to find a reputable international messaging solution service provider capable of providing an intelligent spam trap with multi-layered anti-virus security protection, multi-language filtering and searching capability.

"After studying various industry analyst reports and inviting the top five international security messaging service providers for proposal and testing, only Mirapoint's RazorGate® 500 met all our internal requirements," said Steve Lin, Technology Head, Network Security Division, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. "We want to strengthen our anti-virus and anti-spam capability with significant enhancement of the overall catch-rate and false positive rate."

Solution at a Glance

Huawei installed 8 sets of Mirapoint's RazorGate® 500 in their offices in China and the USA to guard against virus and spam attacks for the entire Huawei network. RazorGate combines the industry's fastest Mail Transfer Agent (MTA) with the best-of-breed multi-layered anti-spam, anti-virus and content inspection technologies.  These include: MailHurdle^TM which blocks up to 80% of threats at the network edge before network bandwidth, storage, processor and administration resources are wasted; RAPID Anti-Spam^TM which stops 98% of spam; RAPID Anti-Virus^TM which provides real-time protection from known and unknown viruses, content filtering, policy management and email encryption; and, last but not least, Junk Mail Manager (JMM) which quarantines junk mail at the edge and at the client level.  

The project was completed in two months and the overall implementation was smooth, timely, safe and successful. The new setting based on high-availability (HA) concept allows a comprehensive system protection mechanism to prevent incidental fail-over. It also offers automatic update on versioning as well as onsite and offsite maintenance, enhancing Huawei's centralised monitoring and management.

The overall spam catch-rate at Huawei's mail server has since increased by 20% with strengthened language capability for filtering spam containing Chinese characters and images. False positive filtering rate has nearly reached zero. 

Challenge during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games

2008 was a special year for the entire Chinese population. While the Olympic athletes strive hard for Gold medals, all Beijing citizens worked their way through a series of temporary measures to improve the city's environment and security.

"Mirapoint Asia helped us meet that challenge by providing professional consultants and IT engineers who worked day and night to help us comply with the tightened IT service requirements. We were very impressed with their support for technology consultation, spare parts and 24 hour stand-by service during the Olympics," commented Mr. Lin.

Seamless Cooperation Continues

Reliability and stability of the messaging appliance is the key to the network defence. Aware of the rapidly shifting nature of the threat, Huawei realises anti-spam and anti-virus strategy cannot be immutable. Mirapoint Asia continues to participate in Huawei's quarterly technology review meeting to share its views and advice on technology trends for secure messaging and issues related to product development. "It was not easy to find a partner who would work hand in hand with us. We are glad that we have found a trustworthy partner for a secure messaging solution," added Mr. Lin.

About Mirapoint Software & Mirapoint Asia Limited

Established in 2008, Mirapoint Asia Limited is wholly owned by Wharf T&T eBusiness Limited (WeB), an IT services subsidiary of Wharf T&T Limited. It provides professional consultation and IT services on Mirapoint secure messaging solutions in the Asia Pacific region including China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Thailand. Founded in 1997, Mirapoint is the market leader in appliance-based solutions for secure message networks in enterprise, service provider, and education organisations, with more than 120 million mailboxes served and secured worldwide. Customers use Mirapoint appliances to build a messaging infrastructure that intelligently serves, secures and manages email.

For information on Mirapoint Software, please visit www.mirapoint.com.hk. For information about Wharf T&T eBusiness Limited, please visit www.WeB-123.com. For information about Wharf T&T, please visit www.wharftt.com .

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