Technology Feed
Twitter
Bolstering Email Services – What Are The Options?
Monday, 8 December 2008
8 CommentsWe are currently investigating ways of improving, consolidating, and bolstering our self hosted, self managed electronic mail service. We wouldn’t want to move to a completely hosted or managed environment as we do try and run everything in house but e-mail is becoming a behemoth. Our electronic mail system is run on an Exchange Server 2007 system but it doesn’t stop there as we also employ a number of additional services in and around the delivery of e-mail:
- Mail Archiving
- Store-and-forward services
- Server based Spam Filter
- Server based Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware
- Gateway Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware
- Gateway Anti-Spam
- Email filtering
We have also been looking at Microsoft Forefront to bolster the email security and we really should look at mirroring the Exchange Server in case of failure – this all adds up, in terms of cost and time.
It would be great to combine, dare I even use the word unify, a number of these services but also achieve some added benefits:
- Business email continuity in case of server failure
- Move undesirable traffic away from our network (as we did when we moved to a hosted web platform)
- Faster, company wide email search
- Gain cost savings
However, some of the things we are concerned about include:
- Obtaining our data should we change service provider
- Ensure our user base experiences 100% uptime
- Flexibility in case of disaster
- To talk to a human being about any problems we face
- Ensure we don’t lose any important emails (e.g. access to the Spam quarantine)
The current options seem to be:
- MessageLabs
(which is now part of Symantec) - Postini
(which is now part of Google) - MimeCast
- MessageStream
- MessageOne
(which is now part of Dell)
If you know of any others drop me a line or post in comments – it will help as we work through the options each has to offer.
Get in touch with me, about this site, or to let people know about your software, hardware, or services. Write to hello@jasonslater.co.uk, or 
Webroot SaaS Security provides all these services with strong SLAs. They seem to be having a bit of fun taking customers from Messagelabs Symantec…
Shame no one has noticed this new entrant to the Gartner Quadrant…
You should consider Azaleos. Most of the cost savings advantages of a pure hosted/cloud service for email, BUT the service allows you to keep all your email data on-premise. Azaleos remotely monitors and manages your Exchange Server and also adds on additional ala carte services for archiving, business continuity/DR, anti-spam/anti-virus, etc.
Have been a MessageOne customer for the past 3 years and they are fantastic! I have only seen improvements since Dell acquired them (like more discounts on my hardware purchases). It also makes it easy because I can just call one company for most of our needs. They seem serious about being a leader in the cloud based on all of their recent acquisitions.
Webroot invested in Email Security SaaS more than 12 months ago and seem like they have done a pretty good job of integrating the business. They do everything on your list but not sure about store and forward services. They are widely deployed across the US and Europe and now that postini and messagelabs have been gobbled up by the giants Webroot remain one of the last independant Email security SaaS players
to Scott Gode;
You could just get someone to manage your exchange server remotely but what if it goes down? wheres the back up? what happens with your inbound email? wheres that stored if there is a failure. What about AS and AV? echange isn’t exactly sharp at those you have to get 3rd party products and then you can usually only aford one. What about archiving exchange doesnt do that out of the box nor does it do content filtering. Jason wants to keep email in house – fine – there aren’t any credible alternatives bar some hastily cobbled together single tenent of premise solutions that have more risk than cost saveing. The other alternative is have some one manage the server on your own site but all the periperal pieces especially security and content control can easily be pushout out into the cloud with credible proven multi-tenent and redundant systems like Webroot.
[...] For electronic mail security and managed hosting solutions you may also be interested in Bolstering Email Services – What Are The Options? [...]
[...] of vendor was complete (you can see a list of potential vendors we looked at in this article: Bolstering Email Services – What Are The Options?) the next stage of implementation was surprisingly organised and gladly painless. We were up and [...]
We use Messagestream to protect our Exchange Server. With many users protecting Exchange against spam and viruses was a complete nightmare. We tried various solutions out there, but settled with Messagestream as we found it worked far better than any other solution. We came across their service after looking through the virusbtn.com results and we tested their service for 14 days which was good.