Size Doesn’t Mat­ter With Email Security

Look­ing for com­pre­hen­sive so­lu­tions for mod­ern tech­ni­cal chal­lenges is some­thing can be both sim­ple and complex.

Just con­sider email for a busi­ness or company.

It is fairly easy.

The busi­ness has its server, uses the email fea­tures avail­able, in­stalls a few se­cu­rity op­tions, and all is well, right?

Un­for­tu­nately, the cor­rect an­swer is „wrong”.

Man­ag­ing Email for Busi­ness is­n’t That Simple

Though a lot of server hosts would like their clients to be­lieve that email op­tions are that easy, the re­al­ity is that there are many other things that go on and that can lead to prob­lems. Such as:

• Emails that ar­rive with em­bed­ded viruses;
• Spam that looks con­vinc­ingly like real email;
• At­tach­ments from trusted sources that are ac­tu­ally in­fected; and
• No ways of re­cov­er­ing ac­ci­den­tally deleted messages.

This is barely scrap­ing the sur­face of the prob­lems that can be as­so­ci­ated with busi­ness or pro­fes­sional email.

And of­ten, the so­lu­tions to these dilem­mas can in­volve the use of IT pro­fes­sion­als and costly soft­ware pack­ages that have to be care­fully in­stalled and set at just the right func­tions to de­liver the best results.

This makes many won­der if there is­n’t just an eas­ier so­lu­tion to the prob­lem - no mat­ter how large or small the busi­ness in ques­tion. The an­swer is email security.

Find­ing a Com­pre­hen­sive An­swer To Email Security

Email se­cu­rity ser­vices are de­signed to pro­vide a rel­a­tively easy an­swer to those who face the many chal­lenges of pro­fes­sional email man­age­ment. For ex­am­ple, let’s take a look at a large com­pany with hun­dreds of em­ploy­ees us­ing email each day.

This firm has work sta­tions for each em­ployee. They are each given an email ac­count and se­cu­rity soft­ware is in­stalled on each machine.

This is meant to iden­tify spam or viruses in „real time” and to warn that em­ployee about the po­ten­tially harm­ful con­tent in a file or email message.

Now, that sounds like a rea­son­able so­lu­tion, but it is open to a lot of po­ten­tial problems.

• For ex­am­ple, what if an em­ployee ig­nores the warn­ing? This could un­leash a virus that hits the en­tire net­work and causes a huge num­ber of problems.
• What if the prob­lem en­ters the sys­tem even be­fore the em­ployee opens the at­tach­ment in the email? For in­stance, what if there is a harm­ful code em­bed­ded in the email and this is trig­gered as soon as the em­ployee opens that email?
• Ad­di­tion­ally, what if an em­ploy­ee’s be­hav­iors on that com­puter end up bring­ing a lot of threats into the sys­tem? How could the net­work ad­min­is­tra­tor know ex­actly who is cre­at­ing these risks and problems?

The an­swer is found in com­pre­hen­sive email se­cu­rity services.

Easy An­swers for Tough Challenges

The use of high tech email se­cu­rity ser­vices means that there is no guess­work or tech­ni­cal mas­tery re­quired to in­stall an op­ti­mized se­cu­rity system.

In­stead, the en­tire sys­tem works by redi­rect­ing every piece of email to a fil­tra­tion sys­tem. The multi-part fil­ters read the dig­i­tal con­tent of any email and quar­an­tine mes­sages with po­ten­tially harm­ful ma­te­ri­als. These fil­ters are also trained to rec­og­nize spam, and spammy items too.

Only when mes­sages are cleared for ac­cess to the com­pa­ny’s email server are they for­warded. These se­cu­rity sys­tems also make it pos­si­ble to cre­ate a re­port on every email ac­count in or­der to iden­tify those who are gen­er­at­ing the most spam or prob­lem­atic messages.

Truly good email se­cu­rity also has the abil­ity to ac­cept in­struc­tions from each email ad­dressee in or­der to help stream­line the fil­tra­tion process, mak­ing it more ef­fi­cient even as it up­holds the se­cu­rity and sta­bil­ity of the com­pany network.

[rms] Ralf Skir­r’s com­ment: Great topic! It’s not sexy, of course, we’d rather read about less frus­trat­ing is­sues. Busi­nesses (ex­cept for large com­pa­nies) al­most al­ways don’t bother about se­cu­rity un­less AFTER some­thing hap­pened.

I see this with my own small busi­ness clients. The only mo­ment a client ever brings up the topic of se­cu­rity is when they are in midst of a crisis.

But: Cy­ber threads are in­creas­ingly tar­get­ing small businesses.

At the same time, con­sumers are more aware of prob­lems and are less for­giv­ing when some­thing goes wrong.

Use this ar­ti­cle as an oc­ca­sion to stop for a mo­ment and re­view the mea­sures you’ve im­ple­mented so far.

Is it enough?