Companies must protect assets through email security

Contributed by Roumiana Deltcheva (Wednesday, November 24, 2010) | Category : Email security

As the most popular form of enterprise communications, oftentimes, a company's most important information may be contained in any of the hundreds of emails it sends and receives each day. For this reason, it is business critical that companies ensure their email security.

Email is a platform that is constantly threatened from both internal and external threats, namely malware and data breaches. To help mitigate threats, Help Net Security recently offered a list of email security best practices.

For starters, companies need to educate their employees. Workers need to know the dangers of opening and clicking on certain links contained in email. Companies should teach them what flags to look for to spot a malicious message.

It is important for companies to monitor their network so they can spot potential threats ahead of time. According to Help Net Security, monitoring all aspects of an email solution can "help determine if your system has been compromised or if you need to take action."

Businesses can adopt strict email policies that prohibit employees from spreading or viewing certain messages on company networks. Measures, such as outbound content filtering, can avoid certain information from being leaked outside of the company. Reliable anti-spam filters can also help a company control and monitor the messages on its network.

Using email authentication and correctly configuring systems are two more best practices to ensure email security, according to Help Net Security. Authentication is an evolving technology that can benefit inbound and outbound email. And ensuring internet-facing servers are correctly configured can be the difference between malicious email being kept off the network or flooding company inboxes.

Companies also need to keep updated with the latest protection measures from their email security vendor. Cyber criminals are constantly creating new and more sophisticated malware, and security firms keep up by protecting customers with patches.

The importance of lockdown email security was reflected in a recent survey that revealed the communication platform is a chief concern for data breaches among IT departments. The study, focusing on small businesses, by an email solutions vendor found 75 percent of IT managers count traditional spam as the greatest threat to network and email security.