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
