Who Cares About Email Security

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.