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General Information
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September 11, 2009
• Vol.31 Issue 23
Page(s) 42 in print issue
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Choosing An Email Security Solution
Tips For Getting The Most Bang For Your Enterprise’s Email Security Buck
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If your enterprise does not have a reliable email security solution, now might be a good time to consider putting one in place: According to a recent report from McAfee, about 92% of all email is spam. But with today’s economy, how do small to midsized enterprises go about selecting the right email security solution at the best price point? Here are some tips to help you select the solution that fits your enterprise.
 Think Security & Consolidation
Scott Cressman, email security product manager at Sophos (www.sophos.com), says a holistic security approach is beneficial to enterprises in many ways. “IT security is becoming less of a mishmash of different solutions provided by different vendors,” he says. “Choosing a vendor that offers the broad suite of products and understands all of the different attack vectors can provide you with significant cost savings and centralize and standardize management and policy definition in a way that plugs the holes and puts control and visibility of the relevant data where it needs to be.”
Keith Crosley, director of market development at Proofpoint (www.proofpoint.com), says functionality must be consolidated at the perimeter. Crosley notes, “IT and data center managers should select a solution that allows them to combine antispam, antivirus, email policy enforcement, data loss prevention, encryption, and other features in a single solution, simplifying your overall infrastructure, reducing the number of vendors, and reducing administration time and costs.”
Crosley says that encryption, DLP (data loss prevention), and Web security should also be considered. “TLS (transport layer security) is a must-have,” he says, “but more and more organizations also need policy-based encryption. Make sure your vendor can deliver it. Also, an increasing number of organizations are needing DLP features due to rising regulatory issues and best practices for data protection requirements.”
Ease Your Implementation Woes
In Cressman’s opinion, IT and data center managers should look for a solution that doesn’t require a professional services specialist to install, configure, and update the solution. Instead, the solution you choose should provide automatable or transparent updates and provide simple means to implement policy and investigate issues.
Cressman says the infrastructure around email and the gateway is sufficiently standardized, so you shouldn’t need to implement custom solutions. “Manage your users and groups through directory services, monitor your systems using SNMP, and offload logs through syslog for data mining with a capable log management tool, if necessary,” he says. “You shouldn’t need to be reinventing the wheel to provide a high level of email security, and any customizations or unsupported configurations will only cost you money and cause you headaches as team members come and go and expertise in a complex solution is lost.”
Cressman adds that support—preferably available 24/7—is an important part of the solution you choose. “No matter how good a solution you purchase, one thing you should never compromise on is support,” he says. “A great support team can make all the difference when you need them most. Be sure to test out a vendor’s support before purchasing and understand what the SLA details are.”
Broaden Your Scope
When choosing a solution, look at providers that specialize in more than one facet of email security. “Try to stay away from single-solution sources,” says Toby Penn, senior solutions engineer for Accuvant (www.accuvant.com). “If they only do spam, then you’ll be looking to a lot of other vendors to plug the other points of control such as DLP, encryption, etc. This is a human cost issue. If you have one management interface that does multiple things, you have less training required and fewer people needed to manage that solution.”
Michelle Dillard, product manager for Sunbelt Software (www.sunbeltsoftware.com), agrees that email security is more than just antispam. She says messaging infrastructures must be hardened against a variety of threats, including phishing scams, viruses, adware, and spyware, all of which impact productivity, cause expensive downtime, or exposure of sensitive company information. However, deploying a separate solution to protect against each threat type adds to the complexity of the infrastructure, making management more difficult and time-consuming. “To ensure maximum security of the network and enable efficient and streamlined management,” she says, “an email security solution must integrate protection against phishing scams, viruses, known malicious URLs, and other forms of malware.”
Get SaaS-y With Spam
One method for fighting spam is to employ a software-as-a-service solution. Penn says it’s important to ask SaaS vendors about their ability to get to the native mail logs. “Why is this important? One reason is troubleshooting,” he says. “On a number of occasions, I have heard of a customer launching a ticket with their SaaS provider and not finding a resolution for three days. Email is a ‘now’ technology, and three days is an eternity.” Penn says having the ability to follow the mail flow and determine if a message reached an organization is crucial.
Crosley says SaaS can also help to minimize costs without sacrificing security. “Osterman Research suggests that, in nearly all cases, the SaaS deployment model offers the lowest total cost of ownership,” he says. “For a typical SME, savings are typically 60 to nearly 90% over on-premises deployment models, driven by savings in labor, capital equipment, bandwidth, storage, and other areas.” 
by Chris A. MacKinnon
BONUS TIPS
Focus on connection management. Select a solution that has the technology both to drop connections based on reputation and to minimize the amount of actual messages that must be processed. This not only saves costs but increases efficiency and effectiveness and guards against spikes and targeted attacks. Look for these features and consider moving them to the cloud if you must deploy an on-premises solution to smooth out traffic spikes and simplify ongoing capacity planning.
Be aware that different solutions count messages differently. One solution may use the message ID (unique number that is tagged to every message), while other solutions may use recipients to calculate their statistics. This can cause widely different numbers to show up. For instance, if a single incoming message is destined for 20 recipients, one solution may count this as one message and another solution may count this as 20 messages.
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Best Tip: Find An EMAIL Solution
Today, organizations are faced with malware-threatened computing environments and frozen or shrinking IT and security budgets. Michelle Dillard, product manager for Sunbelt Software (www.sunbeltsoftware.com), says organizations need to do more with less. To accomplish this, Dillard recommends organizations find a solution that follows the EMAIL model:
E: Easy to install
M: Minimal management resources needed
A: Aggressive spam and virus detection and elimination
I: Integrated antispam, antivirus, and antiphishing technologies in a single solution
L: Low total cost of ownership |
Smartest Tip: Look For Automated Management
No matter what the form factor, a good solution should have automated management or self-healing features. According to Scott Cressman, email security product manager at Sophos (www.sophos.com), “Many appliances, due to their controlled environment, are able to provide self-managed or self-healing features that can identify issues and automatically remediate them with no administrator interaction, proactively contact the vendor’s support team, or alert preconfigured contacts. [Automated] services are often aware of issues and can remediate them before you’ve noticed them yourself. This type of service allows you to concentrate on projects that enable your business, rather than babysitting a solution.”
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