Email Security — Basic Recommendations

E-mail is used to connect an enterprise or organization with the outside world, with remote divisions, and branches. It is also an integral channel matching company employees and ensuring their efficient communication. With the help of email, accounting documents, invoices for payment, draft contracts, commercial offers are transmitted; promotional letters are sent, and other communication tasks are performed. The normal functioning of the company, its productivity, and other related processes depend on how well the email service works.

At the same time, the issue of protecting email from unauthorized access is very acute. A weak level of protection can lead to serious problems. To be able to view email files with ease, then you will need to take into account basic email requirements and service protection measures.

Main Risks of Email

If your email service is improperly configured, there is a whole bunch of risks that you are faced with:

• IT risks — According to antivirus software manufacturers, up to 85% of mail is infected or spam, and therefore the risk of a hacker attack or PC infection is very high;
• Performance — Any downtime will lead to business performance decrease and associated problems;
• ROI — Email is most often used by intruders to gain unauthorized access to a company’s computer network; not only innovative security tools (software and hardware) are important but also their timely updating.

Basic Email Requirements

The main requirements for proper email functioning include constant access, flexibility, ease of administration, low maintenance costs, and the absence of spam and viruses. The relevance of the above increases with an increase in the number of employees, the structuring of the company into separate divisions, the emergence of remote branches and offices. In addition to this, there should be mail hosting and mail protection according to the SaaS model.

You can use the SaaS model to organize an uninterrupted and secure email user experience. There are two options for deciphering the abbreviation:

• Software as a Service;
• Security as a service.

The last transcript translates as “security as a service” and is more relevant. The above is not relevant for small businesses using free or paid services. For them, the issue of organizing corporate mail has already been resolved. For large and medium enterprises, this approach is inconvenient, and they use their own mail servers.

Email Security as a SaaS Solution

Significant costs for the maintenance and maintenance of local mail server security systems make one think about alternative options, including cloud solutions. The way out of this situation is a security SaaS solution that helps to optimize costs or even get rid of them completely. The principle of operation of the cloud solution is simple — traffic passes through special servers that are filtered for dangerous content and viruses. As a result, “clean” traffic goes to the company’s mail server or directly to employees, which is a rather safe approach.

Benefits of Cloud Security Solutions

With cloud-based security solutions, customers can afford more productive resources than on-premises. In addition, here are some more obvious advantages of this method:

• Less server load and hardware requirements;
• Savings on maintenance and support;
• Reduced need for additional staff;
• The detection boundary is outside the network;
• Threats are filtered in the cloud;
• Incoming traffic is reduced by spam filtering before it reaches the company’s mail servers;
• There is no need to store huge databases on local servers;
• Even in the event of a failure of the local server, access to mail is possible online;
• Platform independence.

To keep your business up to speed, it is critically important to ensure email data safety. Apart from the above solutions, you can also take care of email data backups that are automatically updated and can be accessed at any time.

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