* A reader's thoughts on messaging in the SMB space
A reader, a network administrator at a midsized company, shared his thoughts in response to my recent newsletter on messaging in the SMB space:
“I have about 375 e-mail users and there are 3 big issues for us:
1. Policies. We have few and the ones we have are outdated and largely unenforceable. We can’t afford good reporting on who is sending what because of lack of time, lack of a good product and lack of a policy that allows us to actually review e-mail in a timely manner when there is suspicious activity.
2. Filtering and attacks. We’ve been fortunate in this regard. We started using Allegro’s MailZone back in 1998 (now known as Infocrossing’s MailWatch). For a few dollars per user per month, we get spam blocking in several ways, the ability to block specific attachments, viruses and Trojans. An added bonus is our e-mail server accepts e-mail only from MailWatch’s servers, our MX record points to them, so most attacks hit their server farms, not us. If our server is down, our mail queues up for five days in their servers ready to flow down to us when we’re back online.
3. Knowledge. We’re a small shop and everyone is a jack-of-all trades. Keeping up with the latest threats isn’t always at the top of our list – if we even understand the threat fully. Again, MailWatch helps a lot with that, blocking the worst of the Internet junk mail and threats. Time and ability to educate users is also lacking.”
What this points out is the very positive impact that hosted messaging security services can have in the SMB space. Because smaller organizations often don’t have the personnel and other resources to do everything themselves, yet they typically have most of the requirements as their enterprise counterparts, hosted services can provide a needed adjunct to internal resources to ensure that their messaging systems run properly.
Many thanks to the individual who contributed his comments for this article.
