Organizations around the globe, over the last few years, have suffered severely from the loss of sensitive data: stolen, lost or leaked. Such high profile data losses cost organizations not only millions of dollars in both direct and indirect costs, but they also put a question mark on their data security capabilities. Thereby, email hosting services have become a necessity for organizations worldwide as information exchanged through dedicated mail servers is more secure and efficient than the exchanged through public domain mail providers. Windows hosted mail servers have several contingency features to negate any lapse in the reliable exchange of information, and ensure that the integrity of sensitive data is not forsaken.
Let’s take look at five features of Windows hosting mail servers, which you can use to enhance email security:
1. Message Tracking and Troubleshooting
Windows operating system creates detailed records of all mail activities across the network, as mail traverses through the Mailbox servers and Edge Transport servers. These logs are vital in mail flow analysis, message forensics, reporting, and troubleshooting. Additionally, Exchange uses a circular logging algorithm by default, which is based on file size and file age, to limit the message tracking log and the hard disk space used to store these logs. These message logs never contain any message body content, just the subject line of the email message.
2. Countering Spam and Phishing Attacks
Microsoft has developed the Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) feature, which negates any spam and phishing attacks onto your email hosting dedicated servers. FOPE can be easily integrated any SMTP mail transfer agent, and uses multiple antivirus programs in tandem, in the hosted server instances, to stop any junk email and email threats from reaching your network. Additionally, it’s imperative that your email servers have restrictions, so as to respond to inbound requests only from the FOPE network. This implies that the IP addresses of your email server are completely hidden from the Internet to nullify any network intrusion by malicious programs and phishing agents.
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3. Blocking Advanced Malware
There are built-in malware and spam filtering capabilities in Microsoft Exchange, which aid in protecting all message transfers from malicious software. Additionally, filtering customizations can be made in the Exchange Admin Center (EAC), to suit any organizational requirements. By incorporating multiple anti-malware engines in one, Exchange offers a multi-layered protection policy which is impenetrable for all known malware. Thereby, every message exchanged over the network is scanned for viruses and spyware. By using proprietary anti-spam technology, Exchange achieves high accuracy rates in malware detection and remediation.
4. Ensuring Data Leak Protection
Data protection is of utmost priority in Exchange mailboxes, and therefore, these are continually replicated to multiple databases, dispersed geographically, providing data restoration capability. Service continuity management procedures are in case of large-scale failures. Windows hosted email servers incorporate data loss prevention strategy, which ensures that end users don’t send business-critical information outside the organization’s network. For example, if an employee tries to forward a business email outside the corporate domain, they’re denied permission. Data leak protection incorporates stringent state privacy laws to nullify any insider threats, ensure efficient monitoring of endpoint activities, and filter data streams in the network.
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5. Availing Encryption Capabilities
Windows uses multiple encryption capability algorithms such as Office Message Encryption (OME), Information Rights Management (IRM), S/MIME, and Transport Layer Security (TLS). First up, we have the Office Message Encryption, which is a service created including Azure Rights Management policy, enabling users to send encrypted email to recipients both inside and outside the organization, even on public domain address such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook. Additionally, the data which isn’t necessarily participating in any transit is secured by encryption done via BitLocker Drive Encryption. There’s the Transport Layer Security protocol also, which is a cryptographic protocol, providing security over a computer network to every mail in transit, and ensure data integrity between two communicating web applications.
Wrapping up
Nowadays, organization need to stay on top of their game, and access to information plays a crucial role in achieving this goal. Access to and security of business-critical data marks the efficiency of an organization and also enhances the brand image. Thereby, email hosting services based on Windows Server edition, have multiple inbuilt features which provide enhanced levels of webmail security and data integrity protection. To learn more about data center virtualization, call us at +91-120-466 3031 or fill our contact form, and we will get back to you.