Integrated Message Management Key Requirements

Security
There is a clear requirement and duty to provide and maintain security for the organization against the various threats presented by email and IM. The traditional approaches of separate firewalls, anti-virus, anti-spam, and denial of service solutions can be very resource-hungry to manage. This approach also requires an educated and cooperative workforce, and is hard to keep up-to-date across the organization.

An integrated, multi layered approach to security is required, including:
• Virus/Worm detection and deletion
• Spam elimination
• Instant Messaging authentication against corporate identities
• Directory harvest blocking
• Anti-Phishing
• Connection and content threat management

Compliance
The ability to quickly and accurately recover all relevant communications on a particular issue is key to compliance and legal discovery. Also important are the abilities to block offensive or inappropriate communications, both into and out of the organization, and to be able to authenticate all relevant communications (prove they had not been altered since sending/receipt, prove the identities of the senders/recipients, and the dates involved). The organization needs to enforce email and IM usage policies, including archiving of messages, to assure legal and regulatory compliance across the enterprise for both inbound and outbound message content and attachments.

To facilitate compliance in messaging, organizations need to have:
• Policy based email and IM management strategies – with a granular framework
that automatically enforces policy
• Content analysis and management
• Techniques for dealing with encrypted communications
• Archiving of email and IM messages based on global, group or user requirements
• Discovery and rapid retrieval strategies

Availability
Email and IM communications are vital to the organization and their availability 24/7 is demanded, as is the ongoing integrity and security of that communication. Load balancing, redirection, failover and spooling should be in place to ensure the uptime, responsiveness and message integrity regardless of traffic volume or complexity of your environment. Message archiving provides message redundancy in the event that a mail server crash causes messages to be lost.

Ongoing availability requires:
• Message Routing Logic
• Disaster Recovery
• Email Continuity

Visibility
Centralized visibility and real-time command and control of the entire enterprise messaging flow and management is essential. This is particularly important
bearing in mind the increasing propagation speed of attacks. Real-time message monitoring, alerting, and comprehensive reporting are required to enable administrators to maintain an overview at the top level and dig into server, location or user specific details. To minimize administrative effort, users need the flexibility and convenience of examining quarantined messages and self-managing acceptable communications within policy limits. Overall access should be governed to prevent malicious activitywithin the organization, while enforcing policy for outgoing communications.

Good visibility and administration requires:
• Centralized management for the whole messaging platform
• Real-time dashboard and alerts
• Reporting & Supervision mechanisms
• Granular Access Controls