MessageLabs Monday launched its Enterprise Instant Messenger security and management service, based on the hosted secure IM services offered by Omnipod that the company acquired last October.
The service, available now, leverages MessageLabs’ experience in threat protection and combines it with the Omnipod offering to manage and secure corporate use of public IM services, such as those from AOL, Yahoo, and MSN, says Senior Product Manager David Hahn. According to MessageLabs, more than 100 million enterprise employees are currently using IM.
“The first thing people do when they start a new job is download a [free] IM client,” Hahn says, though usually that’s without the knowledge or permission of the IT department, which is stuck having to manage and secure this communication channel. “You don’t want to have to rely on service levels that are nonexistent with these consumer products,” he says.
Yet these IM channels represent significant security risks. At Sirva Worldwide, a moving and relocation services company with 7,500 employees, the IT department had secured Internet communication with firewalls and deployed e-mail filters, but was still getting virus attacks on its network.
“We were getting them through IM, people would do file transfers and the virus would execute on our network,” says Chuck Shmayel, vice president of infrastructure and security with Sirva. “There was no way to detect it until it was too late.”
Sirva was an existing Omnipod customer when MessageLabs made the acquisition, which Shmayel says was a good move. “Now you have a bigger company and greater protection” since MessageLabs is also detecting Web and e-mail threats, he says.
MessageLabs’ EIM gives customers a private IM network across which users in the same organization can encrypt their communications, as well as a secure client for use with public networks, where the inbound and outbound IM traffic goes through the MessageLabs data center for threat and compliance scanning before it hits the Internet.
MessageLab’s EIM service is sold in three different ways. EIM Communicate lets companies securely chat and exchange files within an organization, using the MessageLabs’ Professional Online Desktop client application that allows for centralized storage of files, transmission of SMS to mobile devices and control of who sends instant messages.
EIM Connect lets users IM with people outside of the organization through one of the public IM services. EIM Collaborate gives users the functionality of EIM Connect plus the ability to integrate other applications such as WebEx and SalesForce, officials say.
Pricing for the service ranges from $2 to $8 per user per month.
