Email Security-as-a-Service for SMBs

OTTAWA, US: Even in poor economic times, businesses need to keep pace with evolving security challenges. And for small and midsized businesses (SMBs), those challenges can be even harder to overcome, especially without a dedicated security team.

As shared in a press release by Interwork, the popularity and effectiveness of security as a service (SaaS) can help solution providers and their clients effectively tackle security challenges and take advantage of significant business benefits.

Many companies are joining the SaaS bandwagon and many solution providers are in the process of converting all upcoming renewals to SaaS. In fact, by 2013, Gartner predicts that “many cloud-based services will more than triple in many security segments.”

Interwork Technologies (Interwork), a  value-added distributor (VAD) of managed security solutions, and Reflexion Networks, an email and Web security technology vendor, have announced the delivery of comprehensive email security delivered as part of a SaaS suite called S-Sphere.

“We evaluated several leading email security vendors for S-Sphere and selected Reflexion Total Control as the best choice for our partner base,” says Tim Larocque, Director of Business Development and Marketing for Interwork.

“Reflexion provides hosted services for email and Web security, email archiving and discovery, and business continuity. In addition to providing an extensive layered defense against email and Web-borne malware, Reflexion’s in-the-cloud services help companies save money and staff time, reduce bandwidth and energy consumption, and ensure email availability even in the event of a local server or business outage.”

SaaS is a win-win form factor for resellers and their clients, the company adds. Resellers can use SaaS to add on-demand services such as email archiving and encryption, and can bundle numerous email security services together to create customized solutions for their clients. Solution providers can also take advantage of higher margins, while keeping costs low by eliminating the need to install anything at the customer’s physical location. Clients benefit from less equipment and lower maintenance costs, access to specialized and dedicated resources, and monthly (versus annual) payments that are treated as operating expenses instead of capital expenses.