Whether you are a subscriber to the Inbox Zero mode of email management or prefer to let your unread emails rack up to hundreds or even thousands, there can be little doubt about the sheer volume of email communication. The death of email has been predicted many times, yet we all still use email as our primary method of workplace communication.
Even the rise of secure collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Teams has not made much of a dent in the hundreds of emails that most office workers send and receive each day. Given this enduring ubiquity of email, organizations need to ensure that the security around their email services is as strong as it can be.
Email provides cyber-criminals with many ways of mounting cyber-attacks, so whether an organization uses email services based in the cloud or on-premise, they must be secure. This blog post will focus on four specific areas where the Clearswift Secure Email Gateway solution delivers value for our customers and improves their ROI.
1) Provides robust inbound protection against cyber threats
The volume and variety of inbound cyber threats can be overwhelming for any organization. Ransomware, spyware, phishing emails, Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), and more can all be hugely damaging to an enterprise if they breach defenses, so it is vital to have the most robust protection possible.
For many organizations, this means using Clearswift’s Secure Email Gateway. We always strive to provide customers with the opportunity to shape this solution to suit their own needs, so we offer a choice of Avira or Sophos antivirus software engines. Both update every 15 minutes, so enterprise email is well protected.
But it is the additional protection within Clearswift’s Secure Email Gateway that provides the security and peace of mind required by most organizations. It is a solution that comes with Structural Sanitization, which offers zero-hour anti-malware features and active code detection for the strongest possible inbound protection.
Clearswift’s Structural Sanitization removes any malicious code, in doing so preventing embedded macro-malware, and ransomware from entering a corporate network, whether via phishing emails, drive-by downloads, or attacking uploads. This is all done without any delays to sharing and access, ensuring business can continue as it should.
2) Improves sensitive data protection
With modern organizations holding so much confidential and sensitive data, Data Loss Prevention has become a number one cybersecurity priority for many. Losing data or having it stolen would be a major embarrassment to any enterprise and could easily lead to customer churn, a fall in stock price, or long-term brand damage.
For example, if a travel firm was to be hacked and lose sensitive customer information – credit card details, address, passport numbers, medical issues, and more – it would be catastrophic. Would consumers entrust their next vacation to a company that cannot keep their private information safe?
The Clearswift Secure Email Gateway addresses this via the automatic detection and removal of sensitive data. Clearswift’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality allows the detection and extraction of text from image-based files as well as documents.
It inspects structured and unstructured data within email messages and endpoints and any files transferred to and from the web or cloud for comprehensive data protection. Furthermore, it is a solution that looks at context as well as content, so policies are set according to organizational preference.
Clearswift Secure Email Gateway also ensures that false positives are kept to a minimum, unlike other ‘stop and block’ email security products. On occasion, the redacted information is what is actually required, and a delay in receiving this is highly frustrating. Our Lexical Expression Qualifiers (LEQ) technology is built into the Clearswift Secure Email Gateway. It matches critical information more accurately and effectively to reduce false positives and enhance the overall business value.
3) Supports cloud-based email services and hosted email services
Many organizations have moved or are planning to move their email services to the cloud. Whether they prefer to do so with a managed or hosted option is down to individual requirements, but Clearswift Secure Email Gateway comes with Cloud Security Solutions that provide the highest levels of protection either way.
Moving to the cloud is about managing and improving the availability of applications and keeping them secure, leaving the organization free to focus on any operational elements to an application. The Clearswift Secure Email Gateway delivers on all counts. It comes with all the innovation customers have become used to - Adaptive Data Loss Prevention, Advanced Threat Protection, Email Attachment Sanitization – but provides these layers of email security and sanitization around Office 365.
Office 365 users will also benefit from real-time detection, redaction, and intelligent data security enforcement, zero-hour protection, and the subsequent reduction in spam, phishing, and malware. There is no doubt - Clearswift Secure Email Gateway is as secure in the cloud (hosted or managed) as it is on-premise.
4) Provides secure mobile communications solutions
As the working world continues to open up again after the various lockdowns and business travel returns, people will start sending many more emails from their mobile when on the move. Ensuring mobile communications is not an entry point for cyber criminals will re-emerge as a priority for cybersecurity teams.
The Clearswift Secure Email Gateway has always been a secure mobile communications solution. Because it is a Mail / Message Transfer Agent (MTA) server situated on the transport layer, all emails sent and received via a mobile device will have the same layers of security and protection as those sent via the corporate network.
Trends in the way we work change with the seasons, yet email remains a constant. Securing email is of utmost importance, and the Clearswift Email Secure Gateway is a highly effective way of doing so, offering value and ROI to any organization that deploys it.
The best way to learn how effective it can be is to see it for yourself.
Book a bespoke demo for your organization based on your specific requirements.
