Email is considered one of the most important IT business tools to most organisations. While being a key enabler for your operations , with data leaving and arriving at your organisation, it is clearly a widely used channel of communication that requires the risks posed to be addressed adequately.

Spam has long been an issue for many organisation, and continues to require an adequate technical solution to reduce the ‘noise’ associated, which in most cases is >99% effective. Although spam is an annoyance and wastes bandwidth, phishing emails, such as those with suspicious URLS, and targeted spear-phishing emails with malicious payloads such as malformed PDF or office documents are the greatest cause for concern, and have been repeatedly used as the primary attack vector for numerous recent high-profile organisational compromises. Thankfully, innovative solutions such as cloud based pre-filtering and phishing reputation can continue to provide benefit.

Data loss and secure data exchange is another area where solutions around these technologies can assist. The risk of users who either maliciously or inadvertently send sensitive company information, PII (personal identifiable information) or credit card information out of your organisation, can not only cause brand-damage, but also cause a breach of regulator or legislative requirements, so providing a technical means to monitor and block such behaviour, or where appropriate, provide an encrypted means of communication with suppliers of customers is certainly appropriate. Todays solutions are providing various levels of DLP(data loss prevention) implementation, and encrypted mail transfer with simplified certificate, and sometimes, certificate-less solutions.

Today’s message hygiene and secure email solutions are both mature, and numerous with vendors providing these controls either on-premise, cloud based (SaaS) and in some cases hybrid. Some are incumbent with cloud-based hosted mail solutions and overlying controls for you, some, providing their solutions as an MTA appliance (message transfer agent) appliance for you to deploy onsite.

Our security architects are fully aware of the challenges and choices available to organisations who are looking for ways of mitigating the risks of malicious mail and spam, to those wishing to provide users with an easy means of exchanging encrypted mail and attachments with third-parties and customers. We have worked with the leading mail platforms from Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Domino, with email security products from MessageLabs, Websense through to Microsoft Forefront and more. We can make sure you get the most out of your solution, enabling your number one business tool, email, to remain number one.

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