As a growing number of business functions are moved to the cloud, more companies are turning to hosted email security solutions to further cut costs and, in theory, the burden on their IT departments. However, the way most hosted email security works presents several significant issues that may have your department scrambling. Here, we cover ways to avoid the five most common problems with most hosted email security systems:
Shared IP addresses and databases
Many hosted email security services save on costs by sharing IP addresses among various customers, while also co-mingling your data with their other business clients. These practices can create several security problems. For example, if another company with the same shared IP address is the victim of a spoofing or hacking scheme, your own business’ reputation could be affected. In addition, co-mingling your email data with other clients could expose your network to that company’s malware and spam.
Instead, opt for an email security solution that provides a dedicated IP address for each customer. That way, your email network will enjoy a higher level of stability, and IT can rest assured that you won’t be impacted by another client’s data.
Excessive false positives
Many providers’ elaborate message content filters create a continual stream of false positives, which can waste employees’ time and cost your company money.
For example, one business that uses a popular hosted email security service recently encountered a significant problem: The service suddenly started routing any emails from Outlook addresses into the spam folder. Obviously, this is a huge problem in a business environment, and it required several calls to customer service and a full workday in order to correct the filtering bug.
If you’re struggling with false positives, consider switching to an email security solution that filters by sender, rather than content. This ensures that employees only receive emails from members of their email community, which does away with the possibility of false positives altogether.
Missed spam messages
Even with hosted email security in place, spam messages can still slip through to your inbox, especially when the solution filters by content. This exposes your network to the possibility of phishing and spear-phishing schemes, malware and viruses. To avoid spam making its way into your inbox, look for a solution that includes sender reputation verification and a verified email community for each user.
Significant bandwidth costs
Since many cloud-based email security providers often miss spam messages, your network’s bandwidth must cope with more emails than it should. With 77 percent of incoming email classified as junk, that’s a lot of bandwidth eaten up unnecessarily. For many companies, extra bandwidth has become a significant expense. But switching to a more effective email security solution—one that only forwards valid emails into your local network—helps keep bandwidth costs to a minimum.
Server downtime
For 72 percent of businesses, relying on an outside provider for something as important as email security introduces the possibility of server downtime. Many hosted email security companies struggle to maintain 100 percent uptime, whether as a result of regular maintenance or something unexpected, such as severe weather.
That’s why it’s vital to look for a solution that provides the highest level of system redundancy. For example, the company’s data center architecture should use an N+1 configuration for its mail processing servers, as well as provide VESDA fire suppression and power redundancy. These steps will help to guarantee that the company has a fully available server at all time, even in the event of a hardware failure.
Avoiding these common problems with hosted email security providers will help ensure that your company is well protected from viruses, malware and other schemes, while also helping to maximize efficiency by keeping employee inboxes free of spam. To find out more about Sendio’s approach to convenient, highly effective cloud-based email security, click here to contact us today.
