Vendors strengthen messaging security

With attempts to offer customers one-stop shopping while maintaining a competitive edge, messaging security vendors are adding new services and features to complement their spam- and virus-protection offerings.

These vendors, many of which are making announcements this week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, are adding policy enforcement, encryption, disaster recovery and other features to increase basic e-mail filtering - a function which has become a standard checklist item for most companies.

"Most of the vendors in this space have perfectly good spam-blocking facilities, now they're striving to find a way to differentiate themselves in the marketplace and expand their revenue opportunity [by] broadening their product portfolios," says Matt Cain, an analyst with Meta Group.

FrontBridge Technologies plans to add new dimensions of disaster recovery and encryption to its managed e-mail service before the end of the quarter. Labeled Total Message Management, the company's outsourced service routes an organization's e-mail through a FrontBridge data center before it hits the corporate network, which provides spam and virus filtering, archiving, desktop encryption, policy enforcement and disaster recovery.

New features to the service will provide "active" disaster recovery. Not only are an organization's incoming e-mails received by FrontBridge even when the company's e-mail servers are down, but employees also can access up to 30 days of stored e-mail at FrontBridge's data center through a Web interface, says Dan Nadir, vice president of product management. The new gateway policy enforcement will flag outbound mail that contains key words specific to certain corporate policies - such as health insurance data that is regulated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act - and automatically encrypt them before they are sent, Nadir adds.

Getting spam and virus protection plus archiving from one vendor makes life easier, says Nathan Wright, manager of network operations at Sentinel Benefits in Wakefield, Mass., which provides administrative services for corporate benefit plans. Sentinel was using an archiving service from MessageRite, which FrontBridge acquired last year, and has since added spam and virus filtering. "Having both [filtering and archiving] together is great. FrontBridge would really have to screw up archiving for us to go somewhere else," Wright says.

E-mail appliance maker CipherTrust will announce on Wednesday enhancements to its Secure Web Delivery appliance. It works with its IronMail gateway product, aimed at making it easier for customers to send and receive encrypted messages - a growing need given privacy concerns and recent regulations, says Matt Anthony, director of product marketing. Version 2.0, due at the end of March starting at $30,000, gives recipients of encrypted mail a simple, Web-like interface for reading their messages. It also eases administrative burdens by providing password management, such as automatic generation of new passwords, Anthony says.