Following a competitive pitch, Irish Life will be using Tumbleweed's Email Firewall with Dynamic Anti-spam Service to intercept spam and invalid email and automatically destroy viruses at the financial organisation.

With over one million customers, Irish Life & Permanent is one of the leading providers of personal financial services in the Irish market. Prior to procuring Tumbleweed's products, the organisation relied on ClearSwift MailSweeper to manage the content of its email traffic, including anti-virus and anti-spam functionality. With an upgrade approaching Irish Life & Permanent decided to implement a thorough review of its technology strategy for handling unwanted inbound email traffic. Tumbleweed was one of three solution providers short-listed in a competitive review. The solution is managed and implemented by Kerna, a Tumbleweed partner in Ireland.

As more and more people are using email to conduct mission critical communications, organisations, particularly banks, are increasingly sensitive to risks and threats such as spam and disruptions due to viruses and hackers. As a result, Irish Life & Permanent sought a robust email security solution that would protect employees and their systems from unwanted content in the future - accurately blocking messages containing viruses, spam and invalid addresses at the perimeter while efficiently delivering genuine messages to recipients.

After a comprehensive review of the solutions available, Irish Life & Permanent selected Tumbleweed's award-winning Email Firewall, a product which defends email infrastructures by providing proactive comprehensive anti-spam, anti-virus, anti-phishing and anti-hacker protection at the gateway. Tumbleweed's Dynamic Anti-Spam Service option was also selected, to update the Email Firewall with new spam defences as they are published, thereby minimising false positives in a business environment. As Tumbleweed offers a broad suite of email security solutions, Irish Life & Permanent can also add additional, complementary Tumbleweed solutions such as Mailgate Edge for perimeter defence, or Secure Messenger for confidential email, should their requirements expand.

"We have already seen an increase in functionality, reliability and spam capture rates by implementing Tumbleweed's Email Firewall. As a leading provider of personal financial services in the Irish market, procuring Tumbleweed is a very important move for us as it demonstrates our commitment to providing first class customer service and another step towards becoming the number one in our industry. In addition to offering a comprehensive and proactive security solution, Tumbleweed also introduces a robust architecture which results in significantly lower hardware requirements, a fact which was equally welcome," said Martin Farrelly, Group IT Manager of Information Security and Network Services at Irish Life & Permanent.

Dave Brunswick, Technical Director at Tumbleweed commented: "Tumbleweed's Email Firewall and Anti-spam Service is used by many of the world's leading banks and financial institutions to improve employee productivity and safeguard their email infrastructures through comprehensive protection at the gateway. Filtering out questionable email before it impacts email servers is critical for organisations today - ensuring the integrity of the email infrastructure is key to any bank's success and we're delighted Irish Life has recognised Tumbleweed as the top email security provider."