December 9, 2005 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- A wide variety of technological threats now prowls the Internet, but email is still the target of the most malicious activity, making it one of the most important areas for companies to protect when securing their businesses against would-be assailants.
Businesses must constantly stay one step ahead of these opportunists to prevent valuable information from being compromised.
Email hosts, have their work cut out for them as they compete for the business of a huge percentage of Internet-connected operations, large or small. While the market offers many secure mailing software solutions, most email hosts guard their security technology - often a key selling point for email hosting - closely.
Outblaze (outblaze.com), one such provider, takes a great deal of pride in Sentry Perimeter, the anti-spam and antivirus service it has developed. The technology, until recently, was available only to email hosting customers of Outblaze.
But a demand for the company's particular blend of security recently led the company to spin off Security Perimeter as a stand-alone solution, making it available to both enterprises and ISPs.
"We've released this product for prospective customers who are not in the position to lose their mailbox server to us because it's too big a project for them to undertake," says Stefano Bensi, managing director for US and Europe.
This hosted antivirus technology enables companies to receive and send email without wasting internal resources in blocking incoming virus and spam messages.
"Rather than [a company's messages] going through their email system, all the mail would be sent to our data centers," says Bensi. "We would reject all the viruses and spam, and only the resulting mail is passed through to the server or ISP."
The Sentry Perimeter service is deployed at the network boundary as either a primary or second filtering service.
Bensi says the service offers a variety of value-added email security features for 30 to 50 percent less than other providers and most in-house solutions.
With an enormous reach, Outblaze's inoculation network spans more than 100 countries and encompasses over 40 million active email boxes.
This network provides the Outblaze email security team with a real-time global view of email security threats.
All incoming messages are monitored and analyzed by Outblaze's email security experts, 24 hours a day.
And while the majority of Outblaze's clients are existing email hosting customers, Bensi hopes this will change over time.
"In a year's time, I hope that our makeup of customers will include not only customers who have their mailboxes hosted by us, but also a significant number of clients [whose mailboxes] we don't host," he says.
