Backup and Recovery, Endpoint Security, Mail Security, and Email Archiving

Executive Summary

Overview
The Republic of Singapore’s Energy Market Company Pte. Ltd. is the operator for the country’s wholesale electricity market—the National Electricity Market of Singapore (NEMS)—and provides the 24×7 trading platform. Key activities of Energy Market Company include calculating prices; scheduling generation, clearing, and settling market transactions; and supporting the governance of the market. Energy Market Company had a total 2008/2009 fiscal year budget of about $28.9 million SGD ($18.3 million USD)1 and transacted over $5 billion SGD ($3.27 billion USD) of electricity products in 2007.

Barriers
Seeking greater operational efficiencies, better service delivery, enhanced security, and lower costs, Energy Market Company embarked on a series of next-generation IT initiatives starting in 2005. The IT team sought to address the following challenges. First, they needed to deliver 24×7 system availability through data protection and disaster recovery planning. Specifically, because of the heterogeneous needs of the backup-and-recovery environment, the IT staff was faced with challenges in backing up critical data and emails in a cost-efficient manner. Second, the company’s security processes were manual and needed to be automated in order to drive efficiencies while improving the security posture. Third, the IT team wanted to improve end-user productivity by eliminating email quotas and dramatically reducing the amount of spam. Fourth, the team sought to achieve email storage savings through data compression and single-instance archiving. Finally, the team wanted to consolidate their endpoint security solutions in order to improve security while achieving labor productivity gains.

The Solution
The IT team at Energy Market Company addressed the above challenges with a series of different technology solutions, seeking to adopt leading technologies that are cost-effective, proven, practical, and easy to implement and operate. First, in July 2005, the team consolidated and standardized backup-and- recovery processes—previously spread across several different silo-based solutions per server platform— on Veritas NetBackup. Second, in order to manage and monitor threat management more effectively, Energy Market Company deployed Symantec Critical System Protection in 2007 and engaged Symantec Residency Services to provide ongoing independent audit and analysis of the security infrastructure. Third, in September 2007, the team implemented Symantec Enterprise Vault for email archiving and management. Fourth, in November 2007, the company turned its attention to addressing an ever-growing influx of spam as well as promoting data loss prevention on the email gateway by deploying Symantec Brightmail Gateway appliances that monitor outgoing email and filter incoming mail. Finally, seeking to roll up all endpoint security underneath one umbrella, including network access control, Energy Market Company opted to upgrade to Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 and implement Symantec Network Access Control Enforcer 6100 appliances in early 2008.

Benefits
Leveraging different technology and services solutions from Symantec, Energy Market Company is realizing tangible business value. A Total Operational and Economic Impact (TOEI™) analysis by The Alchemy Solutions Group pinpointed realized and projected business value in the following areas:

• Backup Labor Cost Avoidance: $367,582 USD in IT labor cost avoidance through streamlined data backups despite growing data volumes from July 2005 through December 2010 that equates to $5,250 USD per staff over this timeframe
• Backup and Troubleshooting Labor Productivity Gains: $3,626 USD in IT labor pro- ductivity gains by reducing the amount of time spent managing and troubleshooting backups from July 2005 through December 2010
• End-user Productivity Gains from Spam Reduction: $393,948 USD in IT labor pro- ductivity gains from November 2007 through December 2010 by eliminating spam before it arrives in end-user mailboxes that equates to $5,628 USD per staff over this timeframe
• Email Storage Savings: $3,995 USD in avoided costs (realized and projected) for email storage from February 2008 through December 2010
• Endpoint Protection Administration Productivity Gains: $23,818 USD in IT labor productivity gains through faster identification and remediation of virus or malware from February 2008 through December 2010

These realized efficiencies have allowed the IT team to focus their resources on initiatives that add direct value to Energy Market Company and its customers.