How Safe Is Your Data?

Exchanging e-mails is among the most important commu­nication tool in the
corporate world. At the same time, it is also a common source of sharing
sensitive or confidential information-including operational data, trade secrets
and legal documents. Hence, it is necessary for organizations to ensure the
integrity of their e-mail network in the best possible ways.

To secure e-mail security, organizations must seek a comprehensive,
future-proof solution on a platform that integrates well with their
infrastructure. An effective e-mail security and availability of solution can
help organizations minimize their server costs and storage by reducing the
volume of spam, viruses and other unwanted e-mail, and by migrating older e-mail
to less expensive storage.

With organizations facing a growing number of threats and an increasingly
regulated business environment, ensuring security and compliance across the
e-mail infrastructure is paramount. To block attack and enforce acceptable use
of e-mails, organizations need to deploy integrated protection at e-mail gate,
on the e-mail server and on all endpoint computers.

E-mail security solutions are unique in their ability to reduce risks to
e-mail systems and data. They also ensure uptime and performance of both systems
and e-mail users while satisfying regulatory and corporate policy requirements.
Security personnel tend to focus on issues such as firewall configuration,
network intrusion detection, authentication and access.

The Importance

In today's electronic world, e-mail is critical for any business to florish.
In most cases it forms the backbone of many organizations' day-to-day activity.
At the sametime, it is quicker and cheaper than other traditional methods of
communication.

As e-mail becomes more prevalent in the market, the importance of e-mail
security becomes more significant. It brings with it the necessity to make one's
corporate messaging system as secure as possible. In particular, the security
implications are associated with the management of e-mail storage, policy
enforcement, auditing, archiving and data recovery. A variety of different
elements, like Internet viruses, weaken the corporate e-mail system.

Throwing light on this issue, Vinod Kumar, MD, Satcom Infotech said, “E-mail
security solutions are used to protect the gate. The central pillar in the
defence against e-mail abuse is gateway protection that should scan all incoming
and outgoing messages for spam. In the same scan, e-mails identified as being
part of phishing attack, or containing viruses, spyware and unwanted attachments
must be blocked.”

Spam e-mail results in wasted corporate resources, decreased employee
productivity and increased corporate liability. In addition, increasingly
sophisticated content level threats now commonly use e-mail applications as a
mode of attack. This can be illustrated by the dramatic rise in 'phishing'
crimes, signaling a change in strategy for spammers looking to profit from
unsuspecting users.

How Does It Help?

It is important to analyze vulnerabilities, gather business and technical
requirements, and evaluate technology options. Successful ­analysis requires
technical understanding, business awareness and effective methodology.

The e-mail security can be helpful in following ways:

• Lowers the total cost of ownership
• Stops spam, phishing, viruses, directory harvest attacks, etc
• Provides intelligent routing, load balancing and disaster recovery
• Enforces e-mail security policies
• Provides flexibility to access and examine quarantined e-mails within
  limits set by administrators

The Need

E-mail solutions can be placed at different points in the network to meet
unique security requirements. The solution protects business-messaging system
from malicious or unlawful attacks and reduces network resources consumption. It
also ensures that e-mail systems and users are properly authenticated so that
confidential information does not get into the wrong hands. It protect, e-mail
servers and drives network where confidential information may be stored. And
lastly, it is needed for reducing IT resources by utilizing turnkey
purpose-built hardware platforms, tightly integrated management, logging and
reporting, and fully automated security content updates.

The Benefits

E-mail security solution provides many benefits. It allows significant
reduce in capital investment and provides infinite scalability. It easily
customizes e-mail-screening rules to align business policies and requirements.
Through the solution one can gain greater visibility of corporate e-mail
activity. It also increases employee productivity by reducing the number of
irrelevant and wasteful e-mails and downtime. It provides with predictable
monthly costs and lastly, it removes the requirements for business to have
dedicated e-mail security resource.

Challenges

Some companies lull themselves into a false essence of security upon
installing a firewall (prevents network access by unauthorized users). But they
do not check the content of mail being sent and received by those authorized to
use the system. More targeted measures are needed to counteract this and other
security loopholes in a corporate network.

There is lack of corporate e-mail policy to educate members of the
organization where messaging practice is deemed. A well-informed culture and
education practice is the first and biggest step to secure messaging. Some
solutions are created to tackle a particular menace alone while others contain a
convenient bundle of tools to deal with the various hazards.

Talking about the challenges faced by the company in terms of awareness and
technology, Govind Rammurthy, CEO and MD, MicroWorld said, “90 percent of home
user PCs and 75-80 percent of corporate PCs are infected with spyware today and
people are unaware about it. MicroWorld has this strong vision of effectively
neutralizing them at the mail gateway itself. Compared to the 90s, there is an
increase in awareness among the network administrators and security
implementers. But still, there is a gap in terms of the administrators in
choosing the right solution for their requirements.”

Awareness Is The Key

Every company uses various size of e-mails, and it has become vital for
day-to-day information sharing not only within the company but externally as
well. Talking about the spread of

e-mail security awareness, Anil Pant, VP-Channel Sales, Sify Technologies said,
“We bring out newsletters to educate our customers on the prevailing threats,
case studies to demonstrate how issues were addressed and also conduct seminars
and events to introduce technologies and solutions to counter these threats.”

Cyber criminals are using social engineering methods and drive by downloads
to attract unsuspecting users into visiting and clicking through infected
websites. The variety of social engineering tactics includes-malware
masquerading themselves as latest news or pictures on current political events,
natural disasters or even updates from social networking websites.

The Trends

Currently, the e-mail security market is in the growth phase and is making
rapid strides towards maturity. According to a new study by the Radicati Group,
revenue of e-mail security market in Asia will reach $580 million in 2008 and
will reach nearly $1.2 billion by 2012.

Rajesh Singh, Sr Manager-Sales, QuantumLink Comm­unications said, “With spam
volumes continuing to grow and compliance initiatives like HIPAA gaining
precedence, the e-mail security market can only grow. Looking ahead, the SaaS
and appliance model are said to grow at 30 percent. With virtualization being
the catchword, we could see the virtual appliance for

e-mail security become increasingly attractive.”

The trend will be having a solution that can run on itself and gets
automatically updated so that IT department can easily go and obtain statistics
as to how many e-mail messages have been blocked due to being spam or viruses
infected. However, we have to remember that the more innovative technologies we
develop to stop spam and other e-mail security issues at the mail gateway, the
spammers and hackers will adapt other strategies to beat the security solutions,
and thus will continue the vicious circle.

LIPSHA DAS

lipshad@cybermedia.co.in