Guarding the Corporate Gateway

Messaging is to business what breathing is to humans – there’s no doing without it. So it’s no surprise that e-mail and, more recently, instant messaging (IM) security, as well as compliance concerns continue to be among the most daunting and exasperating challenges enterprises face in the ongoing battle to defeat attackers. Sharp IT organizations, however, are turning to leading vendors like Symantec to protect their messaging environments and preserve business productivity and brand reputation.

In particular, companies are implementing Symantec’s Mail Security 8300 Series appliance as the guard at the corporate gateway. An integrated messaging security solution for e-mail security, IM security, and data leakage, the Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series appliance protects valuable corporate assets while helping organizations mitigate risks associated with regulatory compliance. The all-in-one appliance, with automatic updates, alerts, and other features also allows individual companies to address specific needs while being easy to use and manage.

What's at stake by not securing the enterprise-messaging environment can be measured by:

• End user productivity, IT resource, and messaging infrastructure drain due to spam and unwanted e-mail at the gateway
• Asset damage and downtime due to virus attacks and worm outbreaks
• Regulatory and organizational pressure to monitor and control inbound and outbound e-mail content
• The time spent by administrators to deploy and manage a messaging security solution

What Keeps IT Up at Night?
Instant messaging has the potential to pose a threat for organizations that allow its use. That’s because IM, both a blessing and a curse, claims some 400 million business and consumer users. It’s one of the fastest growing messaging technologies, reaching the 2 million user mark in just two years, compared to taking six years it took e-mail to reach 2 million users.

More importantly, about 84 percent of businesses use instant messaging. “It’s easy, fast and allows employees to keep in touch from remote locations,” said Deaddin Edris, senior product marketing specialist, messaging security product marketing at Symantec.

Instant messaging security features that address threat protection, usage control and monitoring, and visibility and reporting, are part and parcel of Symantec’s Mail Security 8300 Series appliance.

Another serious concern is spam, which continues to be the bane of IT organizations with its potential to bleed employee productivity and diminish network resources. In fact, just three months after PDF spam made its arrival on the spam landscape spammers have presented a new variant of spam: MP3 spam.

According to Symantec’s monthly spam watch report, MP3 spam took center stage in October when it observed a small-scale attack where MP3 files were used to promote specific stocks. Pump-and-dump stock spam has been a long-time favorite for spammers. In this case, an MP3 file, with an average size of 63.3 KB, offered up a garbled audio stock tip that lasted for about 30 seconds.

For business looking to minimize e-mail spam, Symantec’s mail security family of products continues to successfully reduce spam from clogging corporate e-mail boxes. Symantec’s award-winning Brightmail-powered spam protection uses more than 20 technologies to help fight spam including IP reputation services, signature technologies, and heuristics.

Concerns about data privacy and compliance have many C-level executives panicky about data leakage, and the enormous risks of having unprotected enterprise data leave the organization. And rightly so.

According to a recently released study by the Ponemon Institute, a privacy and information research firm, the average total cost per data breach incident was $6.3 million in 2007 compared to $4.8 million in 2006. Costs factors include legal, investigative, and administrative expenses, as well as customer defections, opportunity loss, reputation management, and costs associated with customer support such as information hotlines and credit monitoring subscriptions.

Earlier this year, Symantec reported in its Internet Security Threat Report that the Internet threat environment was characterized by an increase in data theft, data leakage, and the creation of targeted, malicious code for the purpose of stealing confidential information that can be used for financial gain.

The Mail Security 8300 Series appliance filters e-mail content to remove unwanted content, demonstrate regulatory compliance, and protect against intellectual property and data leakage over e-mail. Content filtering and outbound content control features help organizations conform to IT, regulatory, and HR guidelines.

Symantec recently solidified its commitment to protecting information by completing its acquisition of longtime OEM partner Vontu, a San Francisco, Calif.-based maker of data loss and prevention software.

Looking Ahead
To help companies find the best messaging solution fit, Symantec recently made available a virtual offering of the Mail Security 8300 Series. The new offering is part of the company’s latest drive around virtualization.

With the release of a virtual software solution, Symantec is making enhanced customizable reporting capability available across both product platforms.

Integrated messaging security solutions like the Symantec Mail Security 8300 Series reduce the complexity and cost of managing multiple vendor solutions. The product’s advanced technology protection maximizes the benefits of corporate messaging environments by minimizing associated dangers and disruptions.

Protecting more than 750 million mailboxes worldwide and automatically updating appliances every seven minutes, Symantec scans a billion messages a day keeping on top of the latest threats and trends and how to stop them.