What do field sales employees, medical personnel and home-office workers connecting remotely to a central site have in common? A need for up-to-the-minute information. As a common method for near-instantaneous business communication, e-mail can be sent and received in many ways -- via pagers, cell phones and the like. One option that holds especial promise for increasing the timeliness of information flow is Web-based e-mail.
However, many businesses choose not to deploy Web mail because of the perceived security risk of Web-based applications in general.

Understandably, companies do not want to increase the risk of exposing corporate e-mail systems to external threats. Viruses, spam, worms and other events, both malicious and non-malicious, can bring e-mail infrastructures to their knees. And with recent government legislation in countries such as the United States, e-mail confidentiality has become a growing concern.

So, what approaches can a company consider for deploying Web mail systems in a secure manner?

By Keith Pasley at the E-Commerce Times.

[ Read more ]