MessageLabs wins deal with NSW Health

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 09 May 2006 20:22

IT Industry - Deals

Messaging security provider, MessageLabs, has won a contract with the NSW Department of Healthto supply Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus products.

NSW Department of Health started a trial in the middle of August 2005 with the assistance of Dimension Data and completed it in November.

John Brown, Head of IT Infrastructure for the department, said, "To drive strategy and policy on how the health system is run in NSW, we need to take a hard line to protect our communications systems from potential interference. Any disruptions can quite literally have an impact on the health and treatment of patients in NSW.

"We interact with eight Area Health Services, the Ambulance Service of NSW and a number of other Statewide health services, so we don’t want the distraction of spam. Prior to the MessageLabs service, spam had the potential to block up our systems and was very labour intensive for us to control, especially during a spam storm."

In addition to these spam spikes, government agencies are also targeted with spyware. According to a recent international report into internet security trends by firms Counterpane Internet Security and MessageLabs, IT systems in the health sector suffered almost 50% of all spyware attacks, compared with other types of markets and businesses. Plus, in February 2006, DMReview listed spyware as the number one threat to Healthcare Information Systems in terms of lost productivity and wasting IT resources.