Sunderland AFC is a UK premiership football club. The club has over 120 full-time employees at three different sites in the UK. Network security is a top level priority for the club, and a need to defend against the vast amounts of spam and malware it was seeing was an issue when the club upgraded its security system.

Graham Stenning, Systems Administrator, Sunderland AFC, explains: "We were receiving spam, spam and more spam and this was a big problem for the IT department. At one point we had 100,000 emails in a week and 85 per cent of these were spam."

There was no protection for internet browsing either. As Stenning explains: "The security we had in place consisted of a firewall and antivirus. It was good at the time of installation but as the level and diversity of threats grew, so did the need for better protection. We had nothing to protect our users while searching the net either. Offensive content could be downloaded or malicious sites could be visited."

Stenning looked into a wide range of security products before deciding to go for a Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution, as he explains: "We identified three solutions we wanted to trial, but the one that caught our eye the most, we knew next to nothing about. We saw a product review for Network Box's UTM managed service and asked the company to come and see us. What they had to offer was head and shoulders above the others we saw."

The UTM service simplified the IT security at Sunderland AFC, relieving many of the day-to-day issues from the IT team's hands. Stenning adds: "Once we had decided on a UTM solution, we didn't know how much the added managed service would affect us. But it is like having a team of experts working for you, they know more about security than we ever could."

Without Network Box's defences in place Sunderland AFC's network wouldn't have coped with some spam attacks. Stenning explains: "We were recently subjected to a distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) which, without Network Box, would have closed down our server. This could have severely affected our business, but the security kept our servers running."

"We were the first football club to take on a Network Box managed service. Many clubs have now followed suit and they now receive the same high level of service, support and most importantly, security, we have got from Network Box. It is second to none."