Symantec has released its Symantec Messaging Gateway 9.5, powered by Brightmail. Formerly called “Symantec Brightmail Gateway,” this latest release in messaging security extends antispam capabilities with personalized protection against unwanted email. Organizations can now customize their definition of unwanted email to personalize the protection they receive, meeting the varied demands of their individual environments. In addition, Symantec Messaging Gateway allows for tight integration with data loss prevention and encryption solutions to protect outbound communications. Virtual deployment of Symantec Messaging Gateway is fully supported to offer customers flexible, cost-effective options for fighting spam.
With Symantec Messaging Gateway, organizations can now block more unwanted email with new controls to better define acceptable inbound communications. Symantec Messaging Gateway includes new handling for marketing email and newsletters as well as emails containing suspicious URLs, such as shortened URLs where the target has been obfuscated. In addition, Symantec continues to improve its antispam engine to increase effectiveness. According to Virus Bulletin’s VBSpam comparative antispam testing, Symantec blocked 99.87 percent of spam in the most recent March 2011 assessment and consistently scores more than 99.5 percent effectiveness in these tests. With the support of Symantec’s world-leading malware research team, Symantec Messaging Gateway draws on intelligence gathered from more than 120 million devices and more than 800 million users worldwide, the largest network of its type.
Symantec Messaging Gateway extends its integration capabilities with Symantec Data Loss Prevention. In addition to the existing on-box integration, Symantec Messaging Gateway gives customers a simple add-on option for Symantec Data Loss Prevention, to provide a robust messaging security and data loss prevention solution from one vendor. Also, Symantec Messaging Gateway integrates with Symantec Messaging Encryption Gateway Edition, to give customers the choice of deploying on-premise email encryption or Symantec Content Encryption, a hosted encryption service powered by Symantec.cloud.
According to the 2010 Ponemon Cost of a Data Breach report sponsored by Symantec, the average annual cost of compromised data for companies was $7.2 million, up from $6.8 million in 2009. In light of this escalation, Symantec Messaging Gateway is designed to help organizations save money by reducing the risk of losing confidential information while simultaneously detecting email borne threats.
Symantec Messaging Gateway integrates seamlessly into Symantec Protection Center, a single sign-on Web console that provides administrators full access to configuration management, report generation and dashboard views of multiple protection technologies. By bringing together global trends from the Symantec Global Intelligence Network with local threat feeds from integrated security products, Symantec Protection Center provides actionable intelligence to reduce risks and simplify management.
Symantec is helping to drive the adoption of virtualization technology for messaging security with Symantec Messaging Gateway. Symantec offered one of the first virtual appliance offerings in this market, and Symantec’s VMware Ready virtual appliance has grown to represent more than 45 percent of production deployments in the three years since its launch. Symantec Messaging Gateway Virtual Edition, which shares the same entitlement as the physical appliance, can be deployed in hybrid physical and virtual configurations to provide organizations with flexible deployment options and the ability to dynamically scale messaging security resources against rapidly fluctuating email volumes cost effectively.
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