How to keep email available and protected

BANGALORE, INDIA: Small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) continue to generate more electronic information than ever, and at the same time, these businesses are responsible for maintaining a secure environment in which this information can be distributed and stored. Superior email management and security can be a key differentiator for businesses in today's competitive environment. If you want to make your business' messaging environment more secure, here are some security challenges to address:

· Virus and spam protection: Your business information flows through a variety of channels such as email, IM, and portal environments. That is why you need to take steps to ensure the information is not vulnerable to viruses, worms, spam, or other corruption. In order to protect this information, you need to employ solutions at the critical points where data is exchanged to block known and unknown threats.

· Archiving and retention: The volume of unstructured data generated by email, file server environments, instant messaging platforms, and collaboration systems is rising, and businesses face pressure to effectively manage information and reduce retention costs at the same time. Intelligent technologies can be deployed to capture, categorize, index, and store data, enabling your business to enforce retention policies and protect your information assets while reducing storage costs and simplifying management.

· Maintaining data: Email and the Internet have allowed businesses to easily distribute information and become more collaborative. As a result, managing sensitive content such as customer data and intellectual property has become a significant job. That, coupled with regulatory requirements, makes businesses need data loss prevention tools to ensure nothing leaves the information environment inappropriately.

· Discovery and audit: As the number of mandates and policies governing the treatment of email, IM, documents and other unstructured content grows, the frequency and speed with which organizations must respond to audits and legal discovery requests for these materials is also increasing. E-discovery and audit tools can help businesses reduce the time and cost required to locate, retrieve and produce content from anywhere in the IT environment.

· Uptime and performance: Businesses rely on email and other messaging systems more than ever. Maximizing uptime and performance of these systems is crucial, but difficult, in light of the constantly changing nature of the risks. Symantec solutions can help ease this task and lessen the costs associated with managing these systems.