Your network is slow, bandwidth is trickling in at a snail`s pace, your financial director is still waiting for that e-mail sent yesterday which will clinch that multimillion-rand deal, and you don`t know what the problem is. The most common solution? Bounce the server, call the service provider or when all else fails - fire the IT guy. Realistic? No.
The reality is that while you have probably deployed one of the most widely used e-mail gateways in the world, you are now faced with the security and administrative headaches that are associated with the day-to-day running of a large messaging system. With this comes the problem that you are now prone to attacks from spammers, viruses and other security-related threats, the by-product of which could cause countless hours of downtime and loss in staff productivity. IT staff and resources would be over used and under constant pressure, because bandwidth consumption is at an all time high, your network keeps experiencing ongoing downtime, and your data and security is suffering from vulnerabilities.
The reality is that while all systems of this nature are going to be prone to constant threats from the outside, and because technology is a global tool, the problems are themselves going to be global. The resulting implications are therefore widespread and the impact on business is insurmountable. The solution is also not that clear. While you might consider employing more skills, at additional costs, throwing manpower at the problem, the reality is that with the right administrative tools you can cut down the downtime and increase the efficiencies of your IT team.
Administrators are already inundated with a number of daily tasks they have to perform on the system. Some of the tasks we take for granted include the daily checking and downloading of updates and upgrades as well as patches to assist in the protection against spam and viruses, the maintenance of the mail queue and the maintenance of the mail database. Administrators are also responsible for the generation and maintenance of the rules and lists which govern the system, where rules or history lists are lists which define the type of mail which is allowed to enter your internal environment. These rules can be set as an extension of your internal e-mail policy and applied to one or more, or all your users. These lists also include black lists, spam rules and white lists. Furthermore, administrators need to control the release of business-related e-mails which have been blocked by the system incorrectly, while also working around and managing false positives and the implications associated with end-user control or on the converse, the lack thereof.
In our opinion many of these mundane and, to a large extent, manual tasks can be fully automated by the application and installation of a simple 'appliance`, which if installed at the gateway into your business will act as a catcher and 'policeman` protecting your e-mail, and ultimately your business from the point of entry into the network. The technology exists to do this, and systems, such as the IntelliReach appliance that Titan IT currently supports, fulfil the role of the automated administrator.
But fulfilling the role of administrator is not the only security and cost saving benefit your organisation can profit from. An appliance of this nature provides two-tiered anti-virus protection as it integrates the Sophos Anti-Virus system, which in turn provides system filtering of all e-mail traffic right at the source - the gateway. By running this in tandem with your desktop or internal systems anti-virus application you have the benefit of a 'double` shield against outside threats, and to some extent some internal ones too - which if let out can cripple your customers at the other end of your gateway and do its own amount of reputation smearing.
Spam is an increasing concern for companies and some reports state it constitutes up to 80% of all e-mail entering your environment. The reality is that this is a major drain on your bandwidth, and thus also your pocket, as bandwidth in this country remains an expensive commodity. With the incorporation and use of heuristic scoring and lexicon intelligence which enables the system to scan for over 8 000 spam-like characteristics, you are able to create rule sets which immediately reject unwanted e-mail and in turn allow for bandwidth optimisation.
A system of this nature also allows an administrator a view into HTML referenced images through the use of 'crawling` capabilities. This feature scans the images and ascertains whether these are harmful to the environment or if they will cause a potential glut on the network - this is also based on the rule sets as defined by the administrator.
The reality is that a system like the IntelliReach appliance although intelligent, still needs a little coaxing and setting up by an administrative team, but this can be done in as little as a couple of weeks. Once complete very little administration needs to be done thereafter. This makes the system completely customisable according to different organisations needs.
But the physical traffic which enters your environment is not the only threat to your organisation, the end-user themselves can pose a very real, if not damaging threat if their patterns and usage are not monitored.
So while rule sets and history lists can be defined around each user, a user can still have the ability to view their quarantine outside of the firewall. Here they can preview, release, delete and maintain their own white or black lists defined around their e-mail rules; however, ultimate control of this still remains in the hands of the administrator. The way in which this is carried out is similar to the definition of a 'power user` within a Microsoft networking environment. For ease of use, users can access or view this information by way of their mail client via Web-based access.
To summarise, an intelligent appliance which acts as a custodian of your messaging systems, managing your security, monitoring your users and providing your administrator with a single view of the environment they need to manage, allows you to make better use of the tools within your surroundings. In addition, it will assist you to drive down the total cost of your messaging environment, cut back on the number of people dedicated to manage that environment, and allow you to better distribute manpower and system capacity to the areas within your business which are in some cases just as, if not more, mission-critical.
While we as a company specialise in the provision and implementation of these kinds of systems, the real benefit to us is to ensure our clients have what they need and can grow their business with the deployment of other business-related systems and applications which will facilitate the growth of their businesses, because if our customers grow, we grow.
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