David Bull
Senior Product Marketing Manager David Bull oversees the messaging, positioning, packaging and pricing of ...
The product teams here at McAfee work tirelessly to provide our customers with the best security technology available to minimize risk and enable their businesses to operate in a digital environment where new threats and vulnerabilities appear each day. We’re constantly looking at how organizations are operating in the evolving technology landscape, tailoring our products to meet the needs of customers who want to be more productive and run their business more efficiently. This evolution has been happening before our eyes with the transition to cloud-based IT – a form factor we fully embrace in our own product development and operations. And by fully embrace – I mean adopt with comprehensive security measures embedded and layered onto the cloud technology we use to ensure we are not leaving our data out in the open. We don’t think you should leave your data out in the open either.
In the cloud-based productivity space, Google and Microsoft are clear innovators in their efforts to give businesses an easy way to transition away from on-premises IT, and operate more like a lean start-up than a traditional enterprise or small business. A traditional enterprise or small business, however, shouldn’t have to sacrifice security if they want to operate like a lean start-up. Unfortunately, the hosted email services provided by Google and Microsoft leave a critical gap in the security posture of any business with sensitive information.
When you host email in the cloud, as with Google Apps for Business or Microsoft Office 365, there are two key areas that you need to focus on when addressing security. These areas are, naturally, the inbound and outbound flow of your mail – essentially what you allow in, and what you allow to leave. For the inbound flow of email, your concerns around viruses, spam, and some phishing attacks will be covered partially by these hosting providers. Neither Microsoft nor Google however, do a particularly good job inspecting outbound email for sensitive content.
Not protecting your outbound email data is like walking outside in the cold of winter with a t-shirt and no jacket. Sure, you’re partially protected, but you’ve clearly left yourself out in the open. Email is an inherently insecure communication platform, and anything you don’t want the public to see, you need to protect. The best practice in this situation is to layer up. McAfee makes it very simple to layer outbound email protection onto Google Apps for Business and Microsoft Office 365 by simply checking a box in our management console.
Literally a checkbox. This option allows you to filter outbound email traffic for sensitive data, action upon it as desired, and even encrypt email with push/ pull encryption. With most solutions, you would need to manually input hundreds of IP addresses into your email security service to inspect email originating from Google or Microsoft. Not to mention if either vendor makes any update to their IP space, this vast range of addresses would need to be updated on your end as well. Using our service, all of that is taken care of by McAfee.
It really all comes down to simplicity and making it easy to protect information. We want you to thrive as technology advances, not fall victim to the new vulnerabilities it presents. We’ve significantly reduced the time and complexity of layering our email security onto leading hosted email providers so you can continue to adopt the technology that is right for your business. We’re always open to suggestions for how we can better integrate our products into your technology environment. If you have anything to suggest, take a minute to join our online community and let your voice be heard.
Tags: cloud security, Email & Web Security, google, Microsoft, Network Security, Security-as-a-Service
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