Managed Email Security

Benefits

• Improve security: protect your company against malicious and unwanted emails
• Control expenditure: avoid capital investment in hardware and software; pay a predictable monthly fee
• Gain insight: analyse email system use with comprehensive reports
• Improve disaster recovery: stop worrying about lost emails if there's an email service outage

Key features

• Protection against email viruses, including zero-day threat protection against virus outbreaks
• Multiple levels of protection against spam messages
• Highly resilient service based on a distributed network of 12 Microsoft data centres
• Fast, straightforward service activation
• Easy-to-use web-based console for defining and managing rules, settings and configurations
• Comprehensive SLA covering network availability and spam filtering effectiveness

Colt's Managed Email Security is an internet-based email filtering service powered by Microsoft. It offers multi-layered defences to protect your inbound and outbound email communications against viruses, spam, phishing scams and email policy breaches. All unwanted email is removed before it reaches your network, reducing the load on your network and servers.

Managed Email Security supports all popular email platforms. The service can be up and running very quickly; you don't have to modify your existing email infrastructure; provision or maintain hardware; buy, install or configure software; or send your IT staff on training courses.

Disaster recovery capabilities are built into the service: if an email server outage occurs, your emails are queued for delivery when service resumes.

Service activation

Managed Email Security is quick and easy to activate with just a simple mail exchanger (MX) record and firewall change. All your email is then directed to Microsoft data centres for filtering against viruses, spam and email policy violations.

Virus protection

The service provides protection against email viruses, including zero-day threat protection against virus outbreaks. It scans emails for viruses using multiple anti-virus engines.

Spam protection

Managed Email Security offers two levels of protection against spam messages:

1. The service implements in-protocol rejection by analysing connections from all senders and blocking connections from known spammers
2. Multiple spam filtering engines and anti-spam experts scan messages against known spam fingerprints and score them against spam detection rules. Suspected spam messages are placed in a quarantine folder for access by your administrators and end users.

Policy enforcement

Your administrators enforce corporate email policies using an intuitive policy rule writer. They can create and administer email policy rules based on a wide range of message attributes.

Disaster recovery

If your email server or internet connection becomes unavailable, we'll queue inbound email for up to five days. Once the email service becomes available again, all queued messages are delivered to their recipients. If downtime is extended, email can be rerouted to another server or made available through a web-based interface.

Encryption

All emails processed by the service are encrypted using Transport Layer Security (TLS). This ensures total privacy of emails within the hosted filtering environment and of those sent to other organisations that have TLS-enabled email servers.

Reporting and analytics

The service provides comprehensive reports about the use of your email system, helping you to gain insight into and control over it. You can see information such as top spam recipients, top virus recipients, percentage of inbound email flagged as spam, and overall email volumes.