tungsten fogginess: 6 Ways Hosted Email Security Can Protect Your Business ? Web2 ...

As a small to medium business, one of the smartest moves you can make is to implement hosted email security. You need strong security just as much as larger but you don?t have the budget, infrastructure, or staff to support a complex infrastructure. You just need something that works well, and can start working now, and that?s where hosted email security comes in. With email becoming the dominant form of communications between businesses and consumers, strong email security is critical. Hosted email security offers your small to medium business maximum protection for minimum investment.

Hosted email security can be implemented quickly and easily. The monthly subscription model means you pay only for what you need, and makes your costs predictable and manageable. Hosted email security offers several key protections to your email infrastructure. Here are six of the most important ways hosted email security can protect your business.

1. Malware filtering

One of the biggest threats to your users? data and productivity is that an infected attachment or malicious script might execute on their workstation, effectively shutting them down for hours or days, and destroying days or weeks? worth of data. Hosted email security protects you from malware by scanning every message and every attachment with multiple antivirus engines to ensure that what gets to your mailboxes is safe.

2. Inbound and outbound spam filtering

Users spend entirely too much time wading through all the junk mail that hits their inboxes every day. Hosted email security gives them back that time by making sure only legitimate email gets through. And by filtering your outbound mail as well, you protect you company?s reputation by blocking anything that other systems might flag as spam.

3. Protection against phishing

Every day you can read about major companies or government agencies whose systems were compromised by a phishing attack. Hosted email security uses a combination of filters and reputation services to block phishing messages, so you don?t have to worry about a user entering your bank account data into a fake form.

4. Protection against directory harvesting and DoS attacks

Hosted email security can also protect your users and your email system by blocking directory harvest attacks, through which spammers frequently attempt to learn email addresses, or DoS attacks that could effectively shut down your email server and anything else on the connection, like your website.

5. Redundancy

Hosted email security can queue inbound messages when you are performing maintenance on your servers, and even be used by your employees to send messages when your system or circuit is down. If your ISP is having problems, your users can still send and receive email from home using your company email addresses, instead of their personal accounts.

6. Archiving

With so much critical business being conducted by email, it?s good that hosted email security offers you the option to archive all inbound and outbound email, so you can protect that critical intellectual property from any loss.

With hosted email security, you can rest easy knowing that you have world class protections defending your critical email from the worst the web has to offer.

This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Learn more about the benefits of using hosted email security.

All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.