McLarens Canada has offices throughout Canada, offering Canadian insurance companies an unmatched range of risk services in all the major non-life sectors.

Like many businesses today, McLarens was plagued by spam. In fact, some of the company's more than 200 e-mail users received up to 300 spam e-mail message in a single day. If each user spent just 20 minutes a day dealing with it, at an average cost of $20 per employee per hour, the annual cost to the company was more than $300,000 a year. To make matters worse, McLarens users would sometimes delete valid e-mail messages in error. They would also frequently forward questionable messages to the IT department for verification. This meant added distractions for a department that was already dealing with unnecessary loads on the company's e-mail server.

Stopping spam before it gets to the servers
McLarens' servers were co-located at a TELUS Internet Data Centre, where the company's IT resources managed them and TELUS provided full physical security. It made sense to approach TELUS for help with both the spam problem and virus protection. "We tasked TELUS to go out and find a product that would solve our problem," says Don Cortell, the company's IT Manager. "I expected them to recommend a solution to be installed on our server. Of course, that means if your server goes down, your e-mail protection goes down too, but I wasn't aware of any hosted solutions. When they recommended TELUS E-Mail Protection Services, I was very satisfied with what I saw."

Now, all e-mail addressed to any McLarens’ staffmember is first intercepted by TELUS and checked for both spam and viruses. “Anything spam-related doesn’t even hit my servers,” says Cortell. “I’m saving on storage and my users can be far more productive. Instead of having to go through all that spam, they receive a report that tells them exactly what was addressed to them and caught by the service. I also don't have to worry about viruses because I know that there are always three scanners checking every piece of mail and that TELUS is always updating to take care of new threats.”

More time, more space
Thanks to the services, McLarens' users have far more time to be productive and can accomplish more each day. For Cortell, the benefits are even more marked. "One of the things you look at from a tech standpoint is how much hard drive space you require," he explains. "Now, even if spam is addressed to all 200 users, I don't have to worry about whether I have enough space to support the unknown."

The solution is also mostly hands-off for McLarens. It took Cortell about 20 minutes to set up the service initially. Since then, he has probably logged in a total of 5 times, to set up new users. With no need to employ people just to manage e-mail, the department has saved a considerable amount of money too. According to Cortell, dealing with spam internally would have meant adding to his team, potentially increasing his salary budget by 60%. But perhaps most importantly, the entire IT department can now be proactive, instead of having to react to spam and viruses. "A lot of what we do is timing-based," he explains. "Our customers want to see what's happening on their files, but if both my people and my users are dealing with spam, we're not getting back to them. Now, we can concentrate on keeping our users working and they can concentrate on getting reports out to customers. It’s improved productivity all round."