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Recently it was revealed that Manitoba Hydro has successfully deployed Splunk (News - Alert) Enterprise and the Splunk App for email hosting solution Microsoft (News - Alert) Exchange to ensure the availability and security of its infrastructure.

Manitoba Hydro is the electric power and natural gas utility for the province of Manitoba, Canada, serving more than 542,000 electric and 267,000 natural gas customers.

Thanks to this deployment, the company has been able to significantly cut the time it takes the IT team to troubleshoot issues from hours to minutes.

"Splunk software and the Splunk App for Exchange tell us exactly where data is located, when it was last accessed and other key statistics," said James Klassen, exchange administrator, Manitoba Hydro, in a statement.

"I was initially skeptical, but what really caught my attention was how customizable Splunk is. With Splunk you can do whatever you can imagine. You can create scripts and indexes to capture any data or output, and then do whatever you want with that data. It's the unlimited flexibility that really sets Splunk apart," Klassen added.

The Manitoba Hydro messaging environment includes more than two dozen Exchange servers, Blackberry Enterprise servers, and Cisco (News - Alert) IronPort Email Security Appliances (ESA). The organization leverages Splunk Enterprise, the Splunk App for Exchange, the Splunk Cisco Security Suite and the Splunk App for Cisco IronPort ESA to provide a single, cohesive view.

The organization is also using Splunk software to help the IT support group solve Blackberry user problems. The team built an application using .Net and the Splunk PowerShell Search Cmdlet that initiates a remote connection to gather user and public folder statistics from Exchange and Blackberry servers and present the information in a visually appealing and insightful dashboard.

"For most organizations today, disruptions to their email systems sap productivity, and even in the best of times maintaining that infrastructure consumes far too much of the IT team's time," commented Manish Kalra, product marketing director, Splunk.

The Splunk App for Microsoft Exchange gives IT organizations real-time insights not only into the Exchange server logs, but also into the underlying infrastructure including the Internet, servers, Windows event logs from security, Exchange audits and application events, and add-ons like Blackberry Enterprise Server.