Eaton Corporation case study

Background

Eaton Corporation, a premier industrial manufacturer, is an industry leader in diversified power management and ranks in the Fortune 200. Selling into more than 150 countries, Eaton is a global enterprise with approximately 70,000 employees and its email security solution has to scale to the company's high-volume demand and regulatory and safety standards. Everything from confidential employee data, to proprietary engineering drawings, to information subject to regulatory restrictions could be compromised via email without proper security measures in place. The company must be able to selectively pass emails among 350 sites spread around the globe, while ensuring sensitive information stays within its virtual walls. Moreover, hundreds of millions of spam messages target the company's users every month. Eaton must accurately identify and accept the four million that are legitimate. A task that might seem insurmountable is easily and securely managed by one person using a WatchGuard Extensible Content Security (XCS) system.

The Challenge

All of Eaton's worldwide email - inbound and outbound - passes through a cluster of redundant data centers. Behind, a Microsoft® Exchange Server environment handles approximately 45,000 separate email accounts for Eaton users.

Through 2006, the anti-spam solution that Eaton had in place wasn't scaling well. Jeffrey Ringness, Enterprise Security Engineer, recounts the issues they were having: "The system we were running at the time used up significant memory and hard drive space. We had to keep adding servers. At one point we had ten or twelve, and it was getting difficult to manage and expensive to maintain."

The WatchGuard® Solution

In 2006, Ringness and the network security staff at Eaton conducted an industry evaluation, looking at major vendor solutions. The WatchGuard solution was ultimately chosen as the most robust, cost effective, feature rich, and easiest to manage solution. With great success over a three-year contract, again in 2009, Ringness and team conducted another due diligence and re-evaluated other industry leading solutions against WatchGuard XCS, including an outsourced solution. Many features of the WatchGuard solution stood out to Eaton, including a very complete message tracking system that allowed Eaton to search for any message, whether inbound or outbound, and then quickly take action based on those results. The powerful and flexible policy-based message filters and content rules also allowed Eaton to craft unique rules to meet the challenges of running a global email security system that needs to process email from many different language sets. In addition, WatchGuard was able to offer Eaton an appliance-based license model instead of the industry standard per-mailbox model which was expensive and a concern for scaling for future growth. This has proven to be very cost effective for Eaton as they continue to grow their organization. Ultimately, Eaton concluded that the robust technology and appliance-based pricing model offered with the WatchGuard XCS solution delivered the enterprise-class feature set that was ideal for Eaton.

Eaton designed their email security solution with redundancy in mind. The current configuration is multiple active WatchGuard XCS 1170 units, load balanced across multiple datacenters. The clustered XCS units offer sufficient overhead processing capacity that, in the event one datacenter goes dark, the remaining XCS 1170 models can handle the load and process all of Eaton's email traffic. The units handle: spam blocking through the ReputationAuthority service, LDAP integration to accept email for known accounts, policy-based rules, and business partner whitelists; anti-virus and malware protection; transport-layer security (TLS) that encrypts private or confidential messages and data; content security for monitoring certain outbound emails that might contain proprietary or other sensitive or regulated information; and domain mapping to smoothly manage migrations following corporate acquisitions.

Benefits

WatchGuard XCS appliances and subscriptions provided Eaton with a comprehensive, easily managed solution for handling the full range of content-security issues faced by a large, diversified multinational corporation.

Spam Rejection at 98 Percent - Or Higher

The WatchGuard ReputationAuthority service, which blocks spam at the SMTP connection layer, made an immediate impact. "We were maybe at only 70 percent spam detection with our previous solution," says Ringness. "With XCS, we're consistently at a 98 percent block rate now. However, as the volume increases the block rates can inch up even higher. For instance, last August when we saw 329 million emails, we were at a 99 percent block rate."

Ringness maintains an administrative quarantine for high-probability spam messages that aren't rejected outright. Most messages with gray-area scores route straight to the recipient's desktop junk folder through the Microsoft Exchange Plug-in, so users can self-manage.

Integration with Active Directory for Content Security

By tying Eaton's Microsoft Active Directory environment to WatchGuard policies, Ringness is able to enforce fine-grained control over content security in a streamlined way. "We've done a lot with user policies and group policies," he explains. "We manage the users in those groups via Active Directory, and manage the policies on the WatchGuard side. That's been really useful. For example, we acquired some companies in Europe who do a lot of business with customers in Russia. Because a lot of spam comes out of Russia, we created a customized quarantine policy, so those groups could receive emails from their Russian business partners."

He cites some others. "We maintain internal list groups, and we block inbound messages for all our list groups. Exceptions are made for groups wishing to receive unfiltered mail. And at some of our sites, we have engineers working on sensitive products and those sites don't want users to send email outbound, except to specific domains. So we put restrictions in place, just for those sites.

"We've also tested some of the features built into the WatchGuard product for compliancy and content filtering, like preventing credit card numbers going out, and putting watermarks on CAD drawings."

Keeping Up with Regulations

Eaton operates in a complex regulatory environment. Among other statutes, they need to comply with International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). They use transport-layer security (TLS), to encrypt confidential information, such as employee data shared with health insurance and investment companies. As Ringness says, "We used to have site-to-site VPNs to encrypt email with our partners. We've switched almost all of them to XCS TLS encryption because it's so easy to use."

A Team of One to Administer it All

Administering the setup requires an entire team - of one, and that's Ringness. As he recalls, "We wanted a system that had a lot of functionality as far as creating custom policies, but was also easy to maintain. This was the only system that could be easily clustered, and that provided the ability to manage everything from one box without a separate server. I administer the anti-spam, anti-virus and email security piece myself - it's most definitely a manageable solution for one person...," even for one person with 45,000 global email users.

About Eaton Corporation

Eaton Corporation is a diversified power management company with 2009 sales of $11.9 billion. Eaton is a global technology leader in electrical components and systems for power quality, distribution and control; hydraulics components, systems and services for industrial and mobile equipment; aerospace fuel, hydraulics and pneumatic systems for commercial and military use; and truck and automotive drivetrain and powertrain systems for performance, fuel economy and safety. Eaton has approximately 70,000 employees and sells products to customers in more than 150 countries. For more information, visit www.eaton.com.

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