Case study: City of Birmingham

Like many businesses, the City of Birmingham, Alabama was looking for a way to reduce spam and provide its employees with a way to safely browse the web — while at the same time blocking access to productivity-zapping social networking sites such as Facebook. Like many businesses, Birmingham found Sophos was the perfect solution.

"The products do what Sophos says they will. But, that's not all. Sophos supports us as if we're the most important customer they have. That's the highest praise I can give any vendor.”
John Gog, Network System Administrator City of Birmingham

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Fact file

Business challenge

• City needed better anti-virus, email and web protection as their previous endpoint solution didn’t work across all the City’s computers.
• Wanted to restrict access to productivity-zapping social networking sites, like Facebook.

Technology solution

• With help from Sophos engineers, the City’s IT department was able identify GUID strings that could be added to removal scripts. As a result, removing the old software was almost incident-free.
• Users were introduced to the new solutions gradually. Ultimately, the total time for processing 1,300 PCs and users, as well as 90 servers, was about six weeks.

Business results

• Today, with its Sophos solutions in place, the City of Birmingham’s network enjoys comprehensive protection from viruses, malware and spam.
• Sophos updates are more frequent than the City was getting with its previous solution. Additionally, the updates are small enough not to disrupt the network.