Real Time Decision Making Capabilities on the SMTP Application Relaying Backbone
We’ve discovered in many of our large scale messaging infrastructure modernization projects that most production email environments fail to provide the capability to make real time routing decisions based on message content. As a result, email administrators tasked with supporting these environments are extremely limited in their ability to align their company with standards in any of the following areas:
- Ensuring the content of application-generated email did not violate any of the following legislation: SOX, GLBA, HIPPA, FERPA, PIPEDA, Reg FD and SEC Rule 17-4a.
- Enforcing corporate code of conduct requirements, including HR appropriate usage policies.
- Protecting intellectual company property, selective archiving of messages.
- Securing intellectual property, customer data, and privileged email through the use of email encryption technologies.
- Reducing audit costs and risks with unified management and reporting.
IT organizations which do not have the capability to adequately address the above items through the use of a centralized policy management application are left with very few options. Typically, attempts to address these challenges result in numerous autonomous point products that provide the desired capabilities. However, over time, the growing assortments of point products become increasingly difficult and costly to manage. While well intentioned, these heterogeneous products placed limits on content security, filtering, policy enforcement, reporting and virtually every other security function – leaving the enterprise exposed. The ensuing failures put data at risk, and open the door for leakage and regulatory penalties for non-compliance
To properly handle this level content inspection and complexity, a comprehensive enterprise scalable policy engine is needed. Sendmail’s Sentrion MP Appliance policy engine provides a powerful and extensible engine that can create policies based on any centrally defined action, on any message, with any condition; from any individual sender, group, or division and to any recipient. The Sentrion policy engine manages policies for the following applications and options:
- Multiple anti-spam and virus engines
- Zero-hour malware detection
- Packaged policies for HIPPA, GLBA, and CA SB1386
- SMTP traffic control
- Clientless encryption
- Custom policies
In order to more completely understand how Sentrion’s policy engine can add value within an organization’s SMTP application relaying infrastructure, we’ll take a look at some real world deployment scenarios in the next couple of blog posts.