Australian managed service provider, the Ethan Group, has won a three year contract with Victoria Police to provide secure Web gateway and e-mail filtering for the organisation's 14,000 employees.

Police use e-mail security appliances from IronPort, a company that was acquired by Cisco earlier this year for US$830 million.

Ethan will work with Ironport to provide a fully redundant architecture for Victoria Police with protection from external sources of viruses, spam, phishing, spyware and other forms of malicious content.

Ethan Group's team of engineers will customise the gateway, which will be monitored, managed and supported through the CA Unicenter based Network Operations Centre (NOC) for 24x7 availability.

The deal will supply the police with malicious e-mail filtering, business continuity, reporting, auditing, incident management and staff training.

Inbound and outbound e-mail amounted to about 1.3 terabytes of data between October and Decemeber last year, according to the tender documents release in Februrary this year, while 1.2 terabytes Web traffic were processed over the same period.

The solution was required to block 100 percent of malicious e-mails, and have a 99 percent avoidance of false positives. Integration with Microsoft Active Directory ID management framework, and the Exchange and Lotus Notes platforms was also required.

Victoria Police group manager of technical standards and architecture, Marshall Lee, said the police needed a solution with better anti-spam and anti-virus capabilities which offered local support

"Victoria Police identified the need for a higher level of protection from spam, phishing, viruses and other types of non-solicited emails," Lee said.

"We saw this as an opportunity to improve our IT system and the overall improvement in the way it operates.

"We are confident that the gateway will free up the network from spam, improve productivity of the group and offer us 100 percent local support."

Ethan Group division manager, Antony Flutey said the group won the tender for pitching the "most unique and competitive pricing available on the market."

"The solution services government and large corporates to protect their systems from Internet threats. With the support of IronPort, we are able to offer customers such as Victoria Police unique and competitive pricing," he said.

- with Sandra Rossi