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The most efficient and effective business communication tool today, is electronic mail. According to the Radicati group, there are over 400 million corporate mailboxes worldwide, and more than 45 billion e-mail messages are transmitted each day. And while businesses are becoming increasingly dependent on e-mails today, it has also turned out to be a vault of technical disasters.
Viruses, trojans, spyware and spam sneak into corporate inboxes everyday and can seriously undermine the performance of corporate IT system. Another cause of concern for the IT manager is the unwarranted leakage of sensitive company information and data via the e-mail route. So we have IT managers and CIOs spending more and more on security across the globe. Gartner estimates that US $13.5 billion will be spent on security software next year, up from US $ 8.3 billion in 2006, a CAGR of over 10%.
Any good e-mail security system must accomplish the following three tasksperimeter security, confidentiality and non-repudiation.
Perimeter security
This piece of the e-mail security system guards corporate e-mail infrastructure against the entry of spam, trojans and worms. However, the world of anti-spam and anti-virus has become so crowded that it is difficult to zero in on the best approach and solution.
Some analysts have declared that stand-alone anti-virus software is dead. But it is too early to write it off. Multi-functionality in the technology world has become the rule rather than the exception. This trend is converging on perimeter security as well.
The functionality of the plain vanilla anti-virus software is expanding rapidly to effectively combat the changing threat scenario. It is not too long away when an anti-virus software solution will also be routinely expected to prevent data loss. Early signals emerged last year when Sophos acquired Utimaco, a data security firm.
Its important to look at perimeter security as a solution rather than a simple anti-virus or intrusion protection. Appliances bring in the additional benefit of leaving application servers undisturbed because of their dedicated processing capability to manage e-mail security, says Ruchin Kumar, Senior Solution Specialist at SafeNet.
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