* A look at Barracuda Spam Firewall-Outbound Edition
Most network managers have taken steps to curtail dangerous or junk messages coming into their corporate e-mail system. But have you given consideration to what is going out the door via e-mail? Should you even care? The answer is yes.
In this age of political correctness, you don’t want your company to be the source of e-mail that contains an off-color joke, hate mail or threats. Your business contacts would be very unhappy indeed if your organization sends out mail containing the latest virus or worm. And perhaps most importantly, you don’t want your company’s trade secrets or other confidential information streaming over the Internet to people outside the company.
It’s one thing to have a corporate policy against sending inappropriate or confidential e-mail; it’s another to enforce the policy. What’s more, in the case of spamming, it could be that one of your corporate PCs has been taken over as a spam relay and you don’t even know it. So, how do you protect your company against these types of e-mails from getting to the outside world?
One company, Barracuda Networks, has a very respectable answer to the dilemma: the Barracuda Spam Firewall-Outbound Edition, which officially launches Jan. 17. Barracuda offers several very reasonably priced appliances that provide outbound e-mail protection in three ways: stop virus proliferation; enforce corporate policies; and prevent spamming.
To stop the proliferation of viruses, the Barracuda appliances work on several fronts. They offer dual layer virus blocking, decompress archives, block files based on the file type and warn of virus outbreaks. Virus signatures are updated hourly and automatically through a subscription service from Barracuda called Energize.
Corporate policies can be enforced by footer attachment (HTML/text) scanning, blocking based on keywords, attachment blocking and the use of regular expression matching. The Barracuda appliances can be used to ensure that corporate intellectual property remains inside the company. By using a sophisticated e-mail filtering and policy management system, corporate secrets remain secret and regulatory compliance can be assured.
And because no one loves a spammer, Barracuda’s products include the ability to keep corporate PCs from being used as zombies to send out spam by incorporating rate controls, domain/IP restrictions, and user authentication.
The Barracuda Spam Firewall-Outbound Edition is a plug-and-play appliance that is compatible with all e-mail servers as well as multiple e-mail servers on the same network. It comes in five models designed for differing levels of e-mail capacity, and multiple appliances can be strung together to handle millions of e-mails per day. There are no per user fees, making this one of the most cost effective solutions on the market, no matter your network size.
According to Barracuda, it counts more than 10,000 customers worldwide for its tools for scanning and filtering inbound e-mail. Combine that established customer base with its early entrance in the market for outbound email filtering systems, and we believe the company is poised to grab a sizable share of that market as well. And it’s none too soon, as we all need to worry about what what’s leaving the company as well as what’s coming in via the e-mail servers.
Michael Day is CTO for Currid & Company. You can write to him at mailto:michael.day@currid.com
