On the switch to Open Source John Harrington IT Manager of MSI (Europe) said, “The decision to move to open source was a commercial rather than a technical decision and was based on 3 key criteria: security, stability and cost. Cost was obviously a major factor because we had to carefully consider the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) argument in the context of a network of European Branch offices with limited IT skills.

He added, “The decision was also helped by the good business relationship that we've built up with Blue Fountain, who are the market leaders in this area, and the fact that all the projects they have carried out for us in the past have been successfully delivered. As an organisation, it's very important for us to work with companies who have proven to us their ability to deliver.

Blue Fountain Systems Director of Operations John Breckon added, “This system provides MSI (Europe) with a secure, responsive, reliable, functional email system that supports multiple character sets including Japanese that can be accessed both from the internal network or remotely using a secure web interface. The end package is transparent to the users saving both working time and money.”

In addition to email MSI Europe have also put in place a core structure necessary to implement a secure WAN/VPN environment which will allow the secure sharing of data, the deployment of Europe Wide Applications and a central repository for commonly shared data. As with email MSI Europe wanted to implement a cost effective solution.

Technical Details

Blue Fountain has installed BlueBox's into the MSI offices and at their data centre in Brussels to provide the core infrastructure. These machines are fully managed linux servers that are pre-configured to act as a firewall, proxy server, VPN and to allow for the remote support of users. These machines provide a secure encrypted area where email can be sent and received internally without exposure to the outside Internet. When the smaller offices connect to the data centre they will do so using SSL to encrypt data sent and received. WebMail Connections to the data centre are via an SSH encrypted page with the appropriate security certificate.