Customer suCCess

Gmo HostING & seCurItY, INC. isLe Hosting serviceZero spam-related customer cancellations and improved

user satisfaction

GMO HOSTING & SECURITY has provided hosting services for 12 years and now has the largest customer base of any hosting provider in Japan. The company implemented a Symantec Brightmail™ Traffic Shaper mail security appliance to block spam for iCLUSTA, its core hosting service. The appliance is now blocking 60-70 percent of incoming spam. User satisfaction has improved, customer cancellations due to spam have been reduced to zero, and the company is better able to attract new customers.

Filtering spam in a complex environment

GMO HOSTING & SECURITY, INC. (GMO-HS) is a GMO Internet Group company and operates two core businesses: hosting services for individuals and corporations to manage their own Web sites and email, and security services to issue and certify SSL server certificates.

GMO-HS’ hosting service has generated strong results for over 10 years and provides high qual-ity, trustworthy services for customers with top market share in the industry. The company’s main hosting brand, iSLE, has 60,000 users worldwide and provides two services: a shared server cluster called iCLUSTA that boasts 99.99 percent uptime, and a dedicated hosting service that can be customized in 1,336 ways.

Many companies have recently ventured into the hosting business, and the market has, therefore, become saturated. GMO-HS has implemented various measures to differentiate its offerings from the competition. “iCLUSTA offers significantly improved system stability and processing capability using CLUSTA technology and has various shops, business blogs, and groupware to meet diversified customer needs and attract business users,” says Mr. Shiyong Sou, General Manager, Product Planning Dept.

Security is critical to the company’s operations. iCLUSTA has provided antivirus services from the beginning, but it didn’t have a spam email filter, and some users cancelled their services because of this. In Spring 2007, the company evaluated antispam solutions from more than 10 providers.

orGANIZAtIoN ProFILe

Founded in 1993 as a limited private company, GMO HOSTING & SECURITY, INC. launched its hosting service in 1996 and is now listed in TSE Mothers. GMO-HS provides hosting and security services, as well as Web design services. (http://www.gmo-hs.com)

sYmANteC soLutIoN

Messaging Security

Customer suCCess Gmo HostING & seCurItY, INC. IsLe HostING servICe

“The biggest issue was our system being very complicated and large scale,” explains Mr. Makoto Miyajima, General Manager of Hosting System Development Dept. “iCLUSTA is designed to be completely re-dundant, so we set up four different mail servers to perform different functions. We wanted a solution that would allow us to filter spam without revising our system.”

Blocking 60-70 percent of spam with traffic shaper

GMO-HS selected a Traffic Shaper mail se-curity appliance to provide a common spam filter for its hosting customers. The Traffic Shaper blocks spam between the Internet and the email gateway and restricts the amount of mails that flow into network, performing spam filtering at the domain level.

“In addition to mail filtering for all domains, it has superb processing capability that was more than enough for iCLUSTA’s over 100,000 accounts. We decided on Traffic Shaper based on those factors,” says Mr. Yoshitaka Komaki, Group Leader of Hosting System Development Dept.

Initially GMO-HS planned to charge its cus-tomers a fee for spam filtering services, but since many competitors were also offering spam filtering, GMO-HS decided to improve its service level, user satisfaction, and busi-ness returns by providing a free filtering service. It started building the system in April 2008, installing the appliance between iCLUSTA’s firewall and a mail server group to restrict spam that flows into iCLUSTA.

“We saw a big difference between before and after implementation,” says Mr. Miya-jima. “Previously, 30-40 percent of our in-coming email was spam. Traffic Shaper is now blocking 60-70% of incoming spam.”

Zero cancellation due to spam and overwhelmingly strong sales appeal

Since iCLUSTA usually sees an increase in the number of contracted users as well as server usage rates immediately following holiday weekends, GMO-HS had planned to install an additional server to support this load. However, “After we launched Traffic Shaper, the number of spam emails de-creased, and server load eased dramatical-ly,” says Komaki. “As a result, we found that we had enough processing capability with the current system, and we did not require an additional server.”

The impact has been significant for users of iCLUSTA. Users used to receive nearly as much spam as legitimate email. They had to sort through email and manually delete spam as well as identify legitimate mail, which caused extra work and possible over-sight of important emails. Traffic Shaper also reduces risks posed by malware-infect-ed Web sites, online fraud, and spyware.

soLutIoN At A GLANCe

Key Challenges

• Deploy spam email filter at the domain level

• Reduce storage hardware costs

technology

• Linux server

symantec Products

• Symantec Brightmail Traffic Shaper

Business results

• A strong closing selling-point to attract new customers

• Zero account cancellations due to lack of spam filter

• Improved user satisfaction

• Reduced mail server load and stable system operation

“We saw a big difference between

before and after implementation.

Previously, 30-40 percent of

our incoming email was spam.

Traffic Shaper is now blocking

60-70% of incoming spam.”

mr. shiyong sou

General Manager, Product Planning Dept

GMO HOSTING & SECURITY, INC.

Customer suCCess Gmo HostING & seCurItY, INC. IsLe HostING servICe

User satisfaction has increased, and the number-one reason for account cancella-tion, which was having no spam mail filter, is no longer a factor. GMO-HS is also better able to attract new customers, as its free spam mail filter is a strong selling point for iCLUSTA.

GMO-HS is working to continuously improve the reliability and reputation of its email environment. “ Traffic Shaper delays email from problematic senders that are most likely to be spam,” Sou explains. “We were able to find out that quite few mail servers had reputation problems. This is an issue for the entire industry. We would like to cooper-ate with our competitors to set clear rules for incoming and outgoing mails, and the Traffic Shaper will allow us to keep very good track of the reputation of our mail servers.”

©2008 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved. Symantec™ Symantec logos are registered trademark of Symantec Corporation. Other company names and product names are registered trademarks or trade-marks of those companies. Product specification/price may change without notice. The contents of this document are based on the information provided as of July 2008.