Microsoft Exchange is the leading business email and collaboration solution for the small,up to the large, business markets, and this whitepaper compares the security of Microsoft Exchange Services deployed in-house versus a hosted model with SaaS service providers. By choosing Intermedia as their Hosted Exchange SaaS Solution Provider, businesses can achieve email and total messaging security, as well as a piece of mind, by leveraging Intermedia’s infrastructure and experience with running a secured messaging platform.
In-House Vs. Hosted Email Security10 Reasons Why Your Email is More Secure in a Hosted EnvironmentIntroduction
Software as a Service (SaaS) has quickly become the standard delivery model for critical business IT software and services. Business customers realize many benefits by leveraging SaaS services. The On-Demand model of SaaS infrastructure provides benefits to the customer by lowering their overall costs, while increasing flexibility, reliability, and overall solution security. However, as new businesses begin to evaluate SaaS software and services, many still have concerns about security, fearing that hosting their critical business applications and data with a SaaS provider will expose them to greater risk and loss of control. This concern is particularly acute for businesses' messaging and collaboration needs around email and instant messaging. As business email is now a primary method of inter- and intra-corporate communications, including the exchange of sensitive financial data and intellectual property, businesses are growing increasingly concerned about the need for secured email and messaging services. Microsoft Exchange is the leading business email and collaboration solution for the small, up to the large, business markets, and this whitepaper compares the security of Microsoft Exchange Services deployed in-house versus a hosted model with SaaS service providers. By choosing Intermedia as their Hosted Exchange SaaS Solution Provider, businesses can achieve email and total messaging security, as well as a piece of mind, by leveraging Intermedia's infrastructure and experience with running a secured messaging platform
Learn more at www.intermedia.net2The importance of email and email security
Email has clearly become the dominant form of business communication. Businesses exchange tens of millions of emails each day, many containing intellectual property such as product designs, business models, financial data, pricing strategies, supplier agreements, customer information, or employee HR data. Globally, there were more than 700 million business email users in 2006 and this is expected to climb to over 900 million by 2010. It is estimated 1the average business user sends and receives between 500 and 600 non-spam emails per week . In a recent King Research survey of mid-market IT professionals responsible for messaging systems, 96 percent of respondents said email is important or extremely important and has a significant negative impact on business operations when not available. Today email is commonly used for communication and collaboration between both internal and external contacts, used for file sharing, resource scheduling, contact management, and is the focal point of collaborative projects for organizations within virtually every industry. With the large volume of messages containing sensitive business and even personal information from every corner of an organization, it is not surprising that up to 75% of a company's intellectual property resides in email data stores. This is particularly true for knowledge-based and service organizations. These intangible assets that embody patents, trademarks, databases, organizational techniques, and employees' knowledge, experience and relationships represents some two-thirds of the value of America's large businesses.
In addition to businesses' desire to protect the important and confidential information they store in email, industry and government regulations, including HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley, place external and legal requirements on email security. A recent US study found companies estimate nearly 1 in 5 outgoing emails (19%) contained content that poses a legal, financial or regulatory risk. The most common form of non-compliant content is email that contains confidential or proprietary business information (30%) followed by adult, obscene, or potentially offensive content (25%) and personal 2healthcare, financial or identity data which may violate privacy and data protection regulations (20%) .
The Seven Layers of Email Security
The properties that make Microsoft Exchange a powerful communications and collaboration tool also make it vulnerable to different types of threats. A comprehensive security strategy protects against these important threats:
. Viruses and malware - Attackers who use email as a conduit to invade corporate networks for the purposes of either stealing information, o... [download for more]
