Addressing the challenges of email management (page 2 of 2)

The bottom line is that enterprises are seeing increasing requirements for the supervision, retention, and discovery of electronic information as a result of new regulations and from the fact that email is used as a legal document in litigation. This adds cost and complexity to managing the lifecycle of email.

Email security and availability

Symantec believes that approaching the demands placed upon the email infrastructure as a single, multifaceted challenge rather than a series of isolated challenges points the way toward a comprehensive solution. This integrated approach to email security and availability works as follows:

• Risk and data reduction. Enterprises must reduce the amount of unwanted email at the earliest point, even before it enters the network. That means filtering messages and blocking spam, viruses, worms, and other malicious content at the SMTP gateway level to make sure that messages are clean and secure before they get stored on the messaging server. This applies to both inbound and outbound traffic.

• Internal email protection. To protect from internal threats, a security solution is needed on the messaging system. This will scan the message store for malicious content and prevent propagation internally. Outgoing email should be monitored for viruses and for confidential, inappropriate, and oversized content, to prevent this data from being sent through the internal mail system.

• Records retention. Messages need to be archived, based on business policies. Message archiving solutions allow organizations to provide users with a large mailbox while controlling storage usage on the primary messaging servers. Archiving systems let administrators automatically migrate email messages and attachments to a secondary, less-expensive storage location; automatically expire or delete messages, or migrate to a third tier of storage; compress the information and implement single-instance storage, to reduce the volume of information while leveraging disk or tape storage for archived data; and provide instant search and retrieval of content by users.

Equal in importance to assuring the security and availability of email information is building the email infrastructure on a resilient foundation. Storage virtualization and clustering software together enable the highest levels of availability and scalability by allowing the addition of systems and storage, and by identifying and utilizing existing unused resources. This maximizes the contributions of all the server and storage components of the email environment.

Symantec Email Security and Availability for Microsoft Exchange helps organizations ensure the security, availability, and resilience of email systems and information, while reducing the total cost of maintenance of the email infrastructure. The solution takes a multi-layered approach to email security, incorporating antivirus, antispam, archiving, backup and recovery, and storage management capabilities.

Conclusion

Exponentially increasing volumes of email, greater reliance on email as a primary business application, and escalating costs associated with management of the email infrastructure are all driving the growing imperative for a comprehensive, integrated email management solution. IT professionals are striving to respond to the need for longer retention periods for email data, and for high availability and accessibility of email data. The bottom line is that email systems need to be secure to reduce the risks posed by diverse threats.