Typically introducing hosted email security to your network involves configuring a cloud-based solution that aims to optimize your group’s spam detection rates thereby driving down the amount of phishing emails that land in your corporate inboxes.
This type of solution requires no special training, involves minimal maintenance and does not involve any physical additions to your work space. Support is easily provided by the vendor and updates are applied automatically in real time.
How Hosted Email Security Works
Once you have an account created with the vendor you completed the following steps to being using your solution:
- Register your domain
- Nominate a domain administrator
- Redirect redirecting MX records.
Once this process is complete you will be up and running with your security solutio and inbound email traffic will be using the parameters of your Internet usage policies.
The Internet usage policies can be loaded directly from your current directory tools or created and amended as necessary. This allows domain administrators to set a range of acceptable spam thresholds by user, group, domain or business-wide using a centralized management dashboard and create a timeline for reports to be produced.
Domain administrators can keep a close eye on the amount of spam emails being filtered using the dashboard and even set up customized reports. A review of these reports is a good way of auditing online security efforts and spotting possible weak points on your network.
Greylisting & Hosted Email Security Software
Most Hosted email security solutions employ Real Time Blacklists (RBLs) and SURBL filters to tackle emails that originate from recognized spam domains and IP addresses. However, the most successful solutions that return the highest possible spam detection feature the greylisting process. This is where all emails are returned to the sender with a resend request. Spam email servers are regularly overloaded due to the vast amount of spam email that they are sending out as part of their malicious campaigns. As a result the request is not seen and the email is not resent. On occasions when the spam server does spot the request and processes it then the email is subjected to standard tests that review the content of the email to see if there is anything malicious included.
Hosted email security solutions that come with a greylisting capability have reported spam detection levels of over 99% of spam email. Having this on your network practically eliminates the chances of a rogue spam email landing in an unsuspecting member of staff’s inbox.
The time spent by a single office-based employee identifying and deleting eight spam emails per day may not be very long. But, multiply that time by thousands of employees, and over the course of a year a business can save tens of thousands of dollars in lost productivity as well as reduce the number of potential threats entering the mail network by 67% – usually for no additional cost.