Is your email secure? Evaluate your risks.

Email is the lifeblood of an organization; the predominant way we communicate and get things done. For most employees, more time is spent using email than any other application. We average 110 emails a day, and spend roughly two and a half hours a day on email — and for many of us, use is far higher.

So to say that email is mission critical is something of an understatement. And indeed, the average organization devotes a substantial portion of its IT resources to managing email, keeping it secure, and ensuring it remains up and running.

Organizations strive to do this as efficiently and effectively as possible, but with limited resources, security challenges and downtime risks can be a very real threat.

Consider:

• Current research indicates 2-4 percent of all emails contain a virus — meaning more than 6 million email viruses are sent out every single day.
• Spam represents an estimated 70 percent of all email traffic.
• The typical email system experiences roughly 43 minutes of unplanned downtown during a typical month, or eight and a half hours per year.
• Translating that time into money, a one-hour email outage every two months for 1,000 users will cost $52,500 in lost productivity each year.
• Organizations still running Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 are in a special risk class, as it will no longer be supported by Microsoft beginning this summer. That means no more security patches, updates, or phone and/or email-based support from Microsoft.

Rackspace has commissioned a white paper, “Email Security Best Practices and Avoiding Unplanned Downtime: How Does Your Solution Compare on 7 Critical Dimensions?”

The paper offers a concise overview of the factors that can impact an organization’s email solution’s security risks and unplanned downtime (whether you’re using on-premises Microsoft® Exchange Server, another in-house solution, “free” hosted email, or another third party hosted email provider).

The end of each short section poses a series of helpful questions (How Do You Compare? Key Questions to Consider) that can help your organization evaluate current risks. For example, regarding the threat of viruses and malware:

• Are you aware of the full capabilities of your current anti-virus solution?
• Are your network, servers, and/or individual employee computers regularly found to have viruses and malware?
• Do you spend precious time and resources dealing with viruses and malware versus focusing on more important IT initiatives?
• Are you concerned with diminished employee productivity due to virus/malware attacks?

Our email security white paper will also help you better compare and evaluate your current email solution against moving to a newer version of hosted Microsoft Exchange from Rackspace. 

As companies continue to move their email solution to the cloud, security and downtime remain critical concerns. A 2014 InformationWeek Strategic Security Survey found that more than half of companies which responded believe their organizations are “as or more vulnerable” to malicious code attacks and security breaches than they were a year ago.

Don’t wait for an attack that brings down your email system to evaluate your email solution. Take advantage of “Email Security Best Practices and Avoiding Unplanned Downtime: How Does Your Solution Compare on 7 Critical Dimensions?” today — and pass it on.

Courtesy of Rackspace - July 17, 2015
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