Customer Solution Case Study
/ / International Marketing Company Gains Quick and Easy Messaging Disaster Recovery
Overview
Country or Region:United States
Industry:Marketing
Customer Profile
Catalina Marketing helps retailers analyze consumer purchasing behavior to better target marketing campaigns. Based in St. Petersburg, Florida, Catalina has about 1,500 employees worldwide.
Business Situation
Catalina Marketing wanted to find a quick, easy way to ensure that its employees could continue to communicate and run the business in the event of a hurricane or other disaster.
Solution
Catalina Marketing signed up for Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Services, which provides users with access to 30 days’ worth of e-mail messages, as well as spam and virus filtering.
Benefits
Cost savings
Fast, easy implementation
A global, scalable solution
Effective spam and virus filtering / “It’s disaster recovery in a box. People are wowed by how simple it is, and some even say, ‘Hey, that’s too easy.’ Well, sure it’s easy. That’s the point.”
John Twilley, Senior Network Engineer, Catalina Marketing
Catalina Marketing, with 16 offices worldwide, needed an easy and inexpensive communications disaster recovery plan for use in the event that a hurricane were to take out its Florida data center. Management’s top priority was to ensure the availability of global mail systems so that employees could continue to do business. Catalina decided that hardware-based solutions were too costly. Instead, the company replaced its MessageLabs spam- and virus-filtering service with Microsoft® Exchange Hosted Services. The solution provides access to 30 days’ worth of e-mail messages, and the ability to send and receive messages in real time. With Exchange Hosted Services, Catalina gained a fast and easy implementation, a global solution, reduced network traffic, and no reduction in filtering effectiveness. Most importantly, the solution was far less expensive than any other disaster recovery option Catalina considered.
Situation
Catalina Marketing provides strategic behavior-based marketing services to retailers and manufacturers of consumer goods and pharmaceuticals. The company was founded in 1983 with the philosophy that the best marketing is based on consumers’ actual purchasing behavior. Today, Catalina Marketing retrieves and analyzes data on over 250 million transactions per week. It now has about 1,100 employees spread throughout 11 U.S. offices and 5 international offices. Headquartered in St. Petersburg, Florida, Catalina Marketing has annual revenues of U.S.$455 million.
In 2005, Florida suffered a devastating hurricane season. “We had a couple of close calls,” says John Twilley, Senior Network Engineer at Catalina Marketing. “The storms ended up going directly to the east and a little to the south of St. Petersburg, but we were shook-up. Disaster recovery became a very big issue.”
Upper management went through disaster recovery scenarios and decided that communications was the top priority. The company considered several factors, notes Twilley. “If the main data center were to go down, could the rest of the business operate? Could global mail systems be available? In fact, if there were a disaster, we in the IT department would really want a way to communicate with each other and all the departments that were fixing things and transferring data to secondary data centers.”
Catalina Marketing averages about 60,000 e-mail messages a day, comprising 3 to 4 gigabytes (GB) of data, although on peak days the volume can be as high as 30 GB. The company was managing its e-mail with Microsoft® Exchange Server 2003 and an EMC Symmetrix DMX Series networked storage system. It was using MessageLabs for external spam filtering, and Trend Micro for additional internal filtering. Twilley was generally pleased with the solution, but it did little for his disaster recovery concerns.
As 2005 became 2006, those concerns increased in urgency. Hurricane season would begin again in June, and Catalina Marketing needed a plan. It already had an infrastructure that included secondary hosting sites to handle a small disaster. But it needed a solution to provide e-mail to all users—“ideally something that would be up and operational at the exact same time we totally lost our main data center,” Twilley says—so they could keep the business running while the IT staff recovered the network.
Solution
Catalina Marketing considered many different options. Twilley says, “We had hardware vendors come in and say, ‘Your solution is hardware.’ Well of course they’re going to say that! And their hardware solutions would include replication services and other third-party packages—these proposals were so complex they made my brain hurt.”
Then he found a much simpler alternative: Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services (then known as FrontBridge Technologies), including the Exchange Hosted Continuity service, which provides a Web interface for users to access 30 days’ worth of e-mail. Employees can also use the interface to compose and send new messages in real time. The Exchange Hosted Filtering service also provides spam and virus filtering and other functionality for which the company had been using MessageLabs.
In March 2006, Catalina Marketing signed up for the service. “We were the last FrontBridge signed contract,” Twilley says. “I knew Microsoft was buying them and I said, ‘That’s exactly what I want. That means it’s going to be here for a while.’ Microsoft doesn’t just drop products.”
Catalina Marketing continues to use its same hardware and procedures, including the Trend Micro internal filtering. Exchange Hosted Filtering has replaced MessageLabs for spam and virus protection for both incoming and outgoing messages. Meanwhile, the company has set up a Hurricane Task Force. Its members are armed with laptops and trained on the Exchange Hosted Continuity component of Exchange Hosted Services, so that they can run the business in the event of a disaster.
Benefits
Catalina Marketing has achieved its disaster recovery goals—“the whole thing in one swoop,” says Twilley. The solution did not require any expenditure for hardware, was fast and easy to implement, and is globally scalable. Additionally, the company has reduced network traffic and maintained its high rate of spam filtering.
Cost Savings
Twilley considered many different disaster recovery options and is delighted at how much Catalina Marketing saved with Exchange Hosted Services. “We were looking at back-end replication—how are we going to replicate servers, fail them over—and then we said, ‘Do we really even need to bother? We can just use this Exchange Hosted Services solution.’”
He didn’t need to buy new hardware or redesign the infrastructure. “I can't even imagine how much we would have spent,” he says. “We have eight Exchange server computers internationally, and the cost of data replication is quite staggering. Actually, the best thing about this solution is that I didn’t have to imagine how much we would have spent.”
Fast, Easy Implementation
Twilley was particularly pleased that his solution was up and running for the beginning of the hurricane season in June, a task that had seemed quite daunting four months earlier. “We wouldn’t have been able to do all that ourselves in the amount of time that management was looking for,” he says.
But with Exchange Hosted Services, says Twilley, “Setting up the service was just like flipping a light switch. We flipped the switch, the data started flowing through the Microsoft system, and after we got our 30 days rolling we were good. We didn’t have to worry about anything.”
Twilley says, “It’s disaster recovery in a box. People are wowed by how simple it is, and some even say, ‘Hey, that’s too easy.’ Well, sure it’s easy. That’s the point.”
A Global, Scalable Solution
Management had considered replicating server computers between Florida and Chicago, Twilley says. “Then I said, ‘Great, but what about our international users? You have only half of a solution.’” When naysayers then suggested delaying international operations, Twilley countered, “‘I can do the whole solution, the global solution, activate it tomorrow and be fully protected in 30 days.’ It was quite a feather in my cap, so to speak.”
Additionally, the solution is scalable as Catalina Marketing expands. “I don’t have to worry that I need to upgrade a server, or other hardware, or a replication procedure, or anything else. Microsoft does it for me. If we ever need to expand our archives to address Sarbanes-Oxley compliance issues, we won’t have to do anything, we can just upgrade. Check a box, pay a little more money, and we have a seven-year archive,” says Twilley.
Effective Spam and Virus Filtering
Twilley finds the filtering capabilities of Exchange Hosted Services to be as good as those of MessageLabs. “We didn’t get any viruses through MessageLabs and we don’t get any through Microsoft, either. And in fact, we’ve had fewer spam false positives with Exchange Hosted Services, which is a situation I prefer. I’d rather let a little bit through—especially because we catch most of it with our secondary filter—than have people complaining that they never got a message, that’s for sure.”
Twilley also enjoys the e-mail policy management options he can exercise in Exchange Hosted Filtering. “We can block different types of data for different people based on their group affiliations,” he says. “We’re managing data that’s beyond our perimeter, and if, for example, I want to block attachments bigger than 20 megabytes, that’s easy to tweak.”
The result is that at Catalina Marketing, spam is so infrequent, Twilley says, that “people are shocked when they get it. They say, ‘Oh my gosh, a piece of spam. What should I do about it?’ I tell them to smile at it and be happy because it’s such a rarity. As an e-mail administrator, I find it humorous, because they have no idea what it could be like.”
Like spam, the disaster recovery functions of Exchange Hosted Continuity are something that Twilley hopes his users will never even need to be aware of. But that very invisibility provides him with a great level of comfort—at minimal investment. “The service model of Exchange Hosted Services is the way to go, unless you’re a huge shop with lots of extra idle hands. But that’s not us. We’re not a security company. We’re a marketing company.”
Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services
Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services (formerly FrontBridge Technologies) offer an easy-to- use way for enterprises to actively ensure the security and availability of their e-mail environment, while instilling confidence that their e-mail processes satisfy internal policy and regulatory compliance requirements. A seamless extension of Microsoft Exchange Server that operates at the Internet-level, the complete line of services includes hosted filtering for active spam and virus protection; hosted archiving to satisfy compliance requirements and internal policies; hosted encryption to preserve e-mail confidentiality; and, hosted continuity for ongoing access to e-mail during and after disasters. Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services provide value to corporate customers by requiring no upfront capital investment, minimizing IT management overhead, and removing incoming e-mail threats before they reach the corporate firewall.
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