AT&T puts network security in the cloud

AT&T (NYSE: T) believes that enterprises should not have to deal with the headache of managing your network security, but rather focus on their core business.  

Incorporating McAfee's global threat intelligence technology, AT&T's new Secure E-mail Gateway offering is a Security as a Service (SaaS) that provides e-mail security and message management that ensures a message's integrity before coming into an enterprise's network. The service can also monitor outbound e-mail that violates an enterprise's internal data loss prevention policies.

Joseph Blanda, Executive Director, Managed Security Services at AT&T's, says the security service allows enterprises to essentially push the first line of security defense into the cloud.

"It makes a lot of sense to push this functionality into the cloud because some 90 percent of e-mail that comes through is spam," Blanda said. "Rather than clog up your pipes and congest your mail server, we take that hit in the cloud because we can build a larger scale solution and just deliver you the messages that are pertinent to your business."

Two versions of the product are available: advanced and premium. With the advanced version, users get spam filtering in addition to virus protection and malware detection. And in the event that the mail server goes down, the enterprise has the option of getting their e-mail from a central AT&T web portal.

The premium version not only offers the same features of the advanced version, but it also adds data loss prevention (DLP) and encryption.

"We've got advanced policy-based encryption that allows the customer's administrator to go in and put whatever encryption policy they want on the server," Blanda said. "It can encrypt groups or specific end-users, so as mail flows through the system if it triggers that particular encryption policy the mail would be encrypted and sent out the rest of the way."

In addition to the network security elements, the new service provides an e-mail archive service that allows enterprises to store e-mails for seven years.  

For more:
- see the release here
- Connected Planet has this article

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