Why Managed Cloud Security?

Scanning email and protecting your inbox from the assault of viruses and spam has been a major corporate security cost since email become the norm. Your choices were either to scan emails on the server, or on the workstation; or set up a gateway appliance to intercept the SMTP communications, and scan email at the gateway.

This has been the Network Box (NWB) approach since day one –our device, among other things, scans the SMTP traffic for viruses and spam, at the gateway. Our success rate with spam has traditionally been well over 99%, though this fluctuates depending on current outbreaks. Nevertheless, we can certainly say that NWB has been consistently doing a very good job at catching spam without causing too many false positives. As for viruses, our solution has always had multiple engines, based on the idea that it’s better to scan multiple times, just in case.  In 2010, we added Z-scan, our proprietary, award winning zero day anti-malware technology, which truly catches what nobody else seems to be able to even detect!

Scanning at the gateway typically also has the advantage of queuing.  Should your email server be down, the emails are queued on the device, ready to be delivered as soon as the server is available again.

The most common issues with such solutions are:

• If the ISP isn’t working, if the gateway appliance is down, if your email server is down, you can neither receive nor send emails.
• If you’re on the receiving end of a mail bomb attack, your bandwidth may become saturated, causing other issues, and effectively becoming a DoS for your entire network
• Even if you don’t get a mail bomb attack, the sheer amount of spam can be a waste of your bandwidth. Consider that for every email you receive, your anti-spam will likely have to send queries to various online databases (RBL, Spamhaus, whois and so forth).  Hence, not only is the spam email using your bandwidth to arrive at your gateway, but your anti-spam is using bandwidth in order to scan that email and determine whether or not it’s spam.
• If, for whatever reason, your own IP address ends up in Spamhaus or elsewhere, more than likely, you’ll experience serious issues sending emails –nobody will want your emails anymore because you’ve been blacklisted.  And trust me, that’s a real pain to deal with.

Honestly, I could go on and on and on but at this juncture, I’m quite certain that one point is crystal clear –scanning emails before they reach your server is a good thing.  That said, if you could do so somewhere else, there’d be some serious advantages.

Enter the cloud!

Next week, we’ll discuss in detail, the advantages of Managed Cloud Security Emails and why it’s on the fast track to becoming the IT choice within the marketplace.  We’ll also touch on the differences between Managed and non Managed Cloud Security, and why Network Box’s newly-launched Managed Cloud Security Email solution is the only option that makes business sense.

Until then, please visit page to find out more about our Managed Cloud Security Email solution.