Who Cares About Email Security Any More?
Where it all started
Somewhere around 1994 the commercial internet sprung into life swiftly followed
by the first email viruses. Then, one night in 1999 everything changed. The
Melissa virus brought corporate mail servers to their knees, and suddenly email
security was number 1 on the agenda of every IT Manager.
Fast forward now to the mid 1990’s when Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel used
bulk Usenet postings for the first time to promote their legal services, thereby
heralding the arrival of Spam, a phenomenon that blights the internet to this
day. Almost overnight users started to complain about mailboxes crammed full of
junk mail, and new technologies were developed to identify the Botnets that send
out junk mail by the billion. As time passes, IT Security companies play a game
of catch up as spammers constantly change their techniques in their efforts to
beat the spam filters.
Email Security Today
The battle to respond to the ever changing tactics employed by spammers and
malware writers is likely to continue into the future, but in reality the
overwhelming majority of email security products around today exceed the
requirements to pass the tests for virus detection, and provide sufficient catch
rates to bring the nuisance of spam within reasonable bounds. So if the
manufacturers are no longer going round comparing their catch rates, how should
buyers of IT security products decide where they should spend their Email
Security budget?
The Emergence of the Security Suite
Increasingly we are now seeing that email security technology is being absorbed
into the value proposition of the major vendors’ IT Security suites.
Trend Micro
Worry Free Security and
McAfee Endpoint Protection are good examples of
multi-function security suites which provide significant cost savings over
purchasing multiple security products. In fact the security suite offerings of
all of the major IT Security suppliers have grown significantly recently in
their continued efforts to keep their security agent on your workstations and
laptops. Whereas 10 years ago, system security comprised virus detection and
spam filtering, today‘s security suites can include personal firewalls, host
intrusion prevention, peripheral device control, web filtering and even data
leakage prevention.
Defence in Depth
Nonetheless, there is still justification for selecting a different email
gateway security vendor to the one that is selected for desktop protection.
“Defence in Depth” provides you with an insurance policy against the failure of
any single IT Security provider to detect a virus successfully. Furthermore, you
now have the option of making that second vendor a cloud security provider which
provides the additional benefit of removing the overwhelming majority of spam
and viruses before they reach your network. The increased adoption of
Next
Generation Firewalls such as the
SonicWall NSA series which include antivirus
scanning as part of their content security defences can also provide you with an
effective second line of protection against internet borne malware.
So Who Wins?
Email security is of course here to stay. Spam and viruses are unlikely to ever
disappear completely, and in fact IT Security suppliers are constantly refining
and developing new methods to catch malware more efficiently and more
effectively. The good news for buyers however is that the overall cost of
securing their networks is likely to continue to drop in real terms. IT Security
companies are likely to be locked in a “value battle” to retain your business
for some time to come.
