E-mail is at risk - vulnerable to external attack from viruses, spam, spyware and phishing technologies. And vulnerable to abuse from within, which could result in: acceptable use policies being compromised; regulatory compliance violations; and/or confidential corporate data being leaked externally. The recent DVLA disciplinary action demonstrated all too clearly what can happen when acceptable use policies are flouted by a large number of employees.

A plethora of e-mail content security technologies have emerged in recent years to address such vulnerabilities. Companies currently have the choice of two major types of email content security solution: software or appliances. Software solutions have been available for about ten years, while appliances appeared on the market around five years ago. Appliances are purpose-specific e-mail content security servers, typically based on industry-standard server hardware and running a security-hardened Unix/Linux OS to provide the platform for the mail-screening software.

Since their inception, appliances have been touted by some as the holy grail of e-mail content security, winning over many customers in the process. Today, however, the tide is turning.


Plug and play?

The major selling point for appliances has always been based on the perception that they provided a ‘plug and play’, purpose built, e-mail security hardware solution. The idea was that a company could order a pre-configured email scanning system that would simply plug into its email environment and instantly start cleaning spam and viruses from e-mail. In practice, appliances can be difficult and time-consuming to install. The biggest selling appliance product on the market can take up to six hours to install, compared to between 1-2 hours for an equivalent software-only installation. In some cases, an appliance vendor-approved technician must perform the installation because it is so complex, with customers having to pay extra for this service. By contrast, most software solutions can be easily installed by any in-house IT person with a reasonable understanding of email configuration, MS Exchange and firewall administration.

Performance, scalability and high availability

Performance, scalability and high availability are clearly important factors to consider when choosing how to secure a business-critical tool such as email. E-mail scanning should be a transparent process, with no perceivable delay in email performance and should also be scalable - able to manage 10,000 users as easily as it can manage 100. Ideally, it should also be capable of clustering and load-balancing in an array environment, to ensure high performance throughput scanning, and also redundancy for high availability.