The organisation was compelled to begin the IT security upgrade after finding that employees were being increasingly plagued by obscene, unsolicited spam email, as well as large numbers of viruses.
PWCS, which has more than 63,000 enrolled students and more than 7,500 staff and administrative members across 75 district schools, rolled out Proofpoint P600 appliance for message protection.
"We heard positive reviews of Proofpoint's P600 appliance and after mediocre results from our previous spam appliance, decided to test it out," said Jim Hite, supervisor of network services and central operations for Prince William County Schools.
"The results were amazing. Two minutes after Intelligent Decisions installed the Proofpoint appliance, the P600 had effectively stopped 200 spam messages. After a weekend of testing, my director asked me on Monday morning what we changed, because his inbox was suddenly free of spam."
In addition to the spam detection module, PWCS is also using the virus detection and content compliance features of the P600, based on technology from McAfee. Using the content compliance module, PWCS defines policies for outbound email such as limiting attachment types and scanning for certain keywords.
