7 Benefits of Hosted Email Security

Hosted email security is a great service to protect your users from spam, phishing and malware. Hosted email security consists of a service, hosted at one or more datacenters, or “in the cloud”, that processes all email messages sent to or from your company and handles anti-malware, anti-spam and content analysis on the provider’s systems – saving you bandwidth, reducing your hardware requirements, and providing better service per dollar than you could achieve on your own. With all the things hosted email security can do, here is a list of the most important seven benefits the service offers:

Anti-malware

Hosted email security protects your users from malware. Scanning emails and attachments for malicious code, scripts, and infected attachments helps to ensure that nothing dangerous gets to your users’ inboxes – protecting them and your company’s data. And, because a good hosted email security service should scan both inbound and outbound messages, you are assured your users don’t accidentally send anything they’re not meant to send to third parties.

Anti-spam

With all the spam circulating in email today, users can waste hours each week just trying to sort through all the garbage. Hosted email security filters out all that spam before it gets to your users, increasing productivity and user satisfaction. And since hosted email security can scan your outbound messages too, you are protected from ending up on a blacklist because some marketing user “went rogue” and started emailing a customer list they bought off a guy on the Internet equivalent of a dark alley.

Anti-phishing

You read about companies that have been compromised by a phishing attack every day. No matter how much you go over this in user training and company meetings, there are some people who will believe a malicious or scam email, click the link, and provide all the information an attacker wants. Hosted email security makes sure those phishing messages never get to your users’ inboxes, so you don’t have to worry about being the next big news story.

Content analysis

Inbound or outbound, hosted email security can perform content analysis to ensure that email doesn’t contain inappropriate language, sensitive information, or other content that you don’t want your users to see or to send.

Bandwidth savings

Even the lowest estimates have spam making up more than half of all email, and when you are dealing with hundreds to thousands of messages per day, that uses a fairly large percentage of your Internet connection’s bandwidth. Hosted email security filters out all the spam, phishing, and malware before it ever gets to your border, saving you on bandwidth which you can now use for more important things, like customer access to your website.

Storage savings

The chance that one message identified as spam might actually be legitimate is what keeps admins from simply deleting anything flagged as spam. The quarantine folder that stores all these messages can grow over time to the point where it can fill a server’s hard disk, but with hosted email security, the service provider deals with that storage. You don’t have to worry about a spam storm shutting your email server down.

CPU savings

Scanning email is extremely CPU intensive, which is why other admins want to turn off the antivirus software the instant anything seems “slow”. You’ve seen large attachments bring your email server to its knees as it tries to scan those files, especially when they are large compressed files. Hosted email security means all that workload is handled by your service provider, so your servers can focus on delivering legitimate mail and servicing client requests.

Any one of these seven benefits provided by hosted email security makes it a good solution; all of them make it an unbeatable addition to your email system that saves you time, money, and protects your users and your system.

 

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.

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