Email in the Cloud: Email Continuity & Threat Protection
Every year, it seems at least one influential voice in the business and technology space puts a stake in the ground and declares the demise of email. While a bold statement, and not without merit (i.e. the emergence of Skype, Slack, etc.), email shows no signs of being dethroned as the primary tool for communication in the broader workforce.
According to research by Radicati Group, approximately 205 billion email messages are sent per day, meaning almost 2.4 million emails are sent every second and some 74 trillion emails are sent per year. When considering this data, as well as the number of emails that have hit my inbox even as I write this blog, email is here to stay.
As you can imagine, the volume of email any one business manages each day is immense and with the constant transmission of email information comes challenges with maintaining email continuity, as well as protecting against email threats.
How Does Email Continuity Work?
Sometimes email can feel like an annoyance if you’re being inundated with messages, but imagine if that connection was suddenly cut off? Many enterprises rely on email to conduct day-to-day business and loss of email access or usability can not only slow productivity, it can also cost an organization money.
In the event of unplanned downtime, users need a backup plan for email. An “emergency inbox” hosted in the cloud is an ideal solution to ensure your workforce can continue to read, send, receive, forward, attach files to emails and more without impediment to productivity. The following features are critical to help maintain email continuity:
- Emergency inbox to provide accessibility in the event of an outage;
- Automated spooling to ensure always-on email cataloging;
- Automated restoration to provide mail recovery automatically; and
- Instant replay to enable redelivery of lost or deleted emails.
Protecting Email Data by Safeguarding the User
In addition to maintaining continuity, cloud hosting can also help to protect the sensitive information often shared over email. Today’s landscape of potentially harmful and malicious email content is diverse and rapidly evolving to target weaknesses in email communications standards. Yet the greatest threat may not necessarily exist within the technical aspects of email exchange. Often, attackers target organizations at one of the most susceptible vulnerabilities within a business: the end-users.
This can be done in a number of ways, including when users click unprotected links, transmit sensitive data or open attachments that could expose the organization to risk. Common cyber threat tactics, like phishing schemes and ransomware, rely on the fault of the user to infiltrate systems.
So, while tools like Microsoft’s Office 365 are enabling email to be managed more efficiently in the cloud, they also require the initiative of expert providers to strengthen cloud email security measures and safeguard employees—especially in the event of a service interruption.
With the right managed cloud partner, and solutions in place for uninterrupted and secure email activities, modern organizations can seamlessly communicate during potential unplanned downtime of their productivity suite—without compromising data security or diminishing the user experience. The following features should be considered as part of any sound security strategy:
- Inbound and outbound email filtering to ensure constant and real-time threat protection;
- Zero-hour threat detection to proactively evaluate attachments and messages against potential threats;
- Signature-based antivirus to detect and prevent known threats from reaching the end user unidentified. To learn more about antivirus software, click here;
- Spam filtering to sort out any questionable messages and flag them as spam;
- Real-time live event monitoring and reporting to provide continuous, real-time updates on threats and vulnerabilities; and
- Additional features, such as URL defense, attachment defense, Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and email encryption, can also further protect email communication.
Email is a mainstay of business communication and, while enterprises are beginning to leverage business messaging tools more regularly in day-to-day communication, it’s important to maintain and protect the “original” form of digital communication in the workplace.
To offer clients peace of mind when it comes to email, we’ve partnered with industry-leading service partner for email continuity, Proofpoint, to elevate the standards for end-user operations and business competency. Through this partnership, clients can choose from multiple service tiers to target their distinct security and email integrity requirements. We’ll focus on keeping email running, so you can focus on keeping your inbox in check!
Learn how NaviSite’s Managed Office 365 Productivity Suite, powered by Microsoft and enhanced by Proofpoint, can enable you to seamlessly communicate during potential unplanned downtime of the Office 365 productivity suite, without compromising data security or diminishing the user experience.