Sendmail to Participate in CIOsynergy New York Conference

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Barry Shurtz

Sendmail is excited to share that we will be attending the tomorrow’s, August 18, CIOsynergy New York Conference , an event that brings together the true visionaries of enterprise IT leadership.  As part of our participation, we will be lending our expertise in modernizing enterprise messaging infrastructure and to discuss top issues relating to migrating messaging infrastructure to the cloud and virtualized environments.

The adoption of these technologies are gaining traction in the enterprise, and companies need guidance on selecting the right platform and applications to simplify their complex messaging requirements. Security and compliance are common concerns, and often limit the capability to move mission-critical initiatives to these new platforms.

This year’s event will feature the CIO leadership panel and keynote Peter Guber—American film producer, renowned CEO and author, Chairman and CEO of Mandalay Entertainment, and former CEO of Sony Pictures. The panel of five CIOs will discuss, debate and challenge the focus of today’s enterprise IT.  They will talk one-on-one with these Enterprise leaders and reveal winning strategies that have kept the organizations they serve ahead of the pack.

We look forward to the event and hope to see you there!

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Sendmail and Harris Cloud Event a Success!

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Glen D. Vondrick

Last week, we had the wonderful opportunity of hosting an event with Harris Corporation at the Congressional Country Club in Washington DC. Together we offered a joint session for professionals in the area titled Secure Email in the Cloud: Fact, Fiction and Reality. The goal of the event was to bring together industry experts to provide large commercial and government enterprises insights and advice around secure email in the cloud and to help organizations better understand the benefits and challenges associated with migrating email to the cloud.

I was joined by our very own Jim Seaman, VP Federal, Sendmail as well as Rich Plane, Head of Engineering and Development for Harris, along with over 70 attendees. Event participants ranged from individuals with government agencies and commercial enterprises’ to system integrators to Sendmail partners (Harris, Raytheon, VMware, Zimbra and others) to analysts from Gartner and more.

The conversations had at the event were of true interest and it was encouraging to see everyone engaging and talking about a range of topics around email in the cloud.  The key take-aways from the presentations and conversations were around the fact that it’s not as easy as some think it is to pick up email from on-premises and move it to the cloud and that large enterprises are indeed discovering holes in cloud email – it’s not a cookie cutter solution.  The cloud is not just hype and organizations need to assess cloud email and consider both the drivers for change – cost savings, economies of scale, and increased productivity – as well as the risks – compliance and security, control and customization.

Sendmail, for example, has longstanding credibility with strong data points and proof points around messaging compliance, control, security and customization and the fact that there are thousands of machine-generated and application-enabled SMTP apps that could cause an email migration to the cloud to be a disaster.  Part of the excitement and buzz of the event was around our announcement that same day that Sendmail has joined forces with Harris to offer secure cloud-based email for federal agencies looking to comply with the “Cloud First” policy and for large commercial enterprises concerned about security, compliance and manageability of their email.

Thank you to everyone that made this event a success – from our team, to our partners, to everyone that joined us – we couldn’t have done it without you and we look forward to continuing those conversations!

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about what was discussed at the event, we’ll look forward to your comments.

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U.S. Government Agencies are Getting on Board with Cloud Computing

Posted on July 22, 2011 by Barry Shurtz

Sendmail’s very own Jim Seaman, VP of Federal, had the opportunity to do a Q&A contributed piece for Enterprise Systems Journal, titled, “Q&A: Why Government Agencies Are Finally Moving to the Cloud”. Enterprise Systems Journal editor-in-chief, James Powell, spoke with Jim about the government sector and the cloud.

In the piece, Jim discussed what’s driving the move, what applications are the first to be moved, and what cloud deployments models are the most popular and some of the key points he noted include:

  • Cost savings is the driver and the attention-getter when it comes to cloud computing in the federal government, as well as data center consolidation, which has a major impact on reducing the cost of delivering IT services.
  • An accelerating trend is federal agencies migrating applications that are low in security risk to the cloud.
  • E-mail is one of the first applications to be considered for the cloud, in part because the perception is that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon, and dozens of others offer free Web-based e-mail to the public for years, and that it’s “easy.”
  • IT organizations are learning that it is not as easy as it appears, especially for large organizations with complex messaging requirements.
  • There is potentially a significant ROI for moving a layer of an e-mail infrastructure to the cloud, but there are more risks involved, such as storing sensitive business information outside that respective organizations secure internal network.
  • In looking at the e-mail infrastructure, the gateway security systems that filer inbound e-mail are the easiest to migrate to the cloud.
  • Private clouds will be the most frequent type of cloud deployment model in government, with the second most frequent being community clouds.

In order to help agencies move to the cloud, Sendmail provides Global 2000 companies and government agencies the e-mail backbone infrastructure (“middleware”) required to move the commodity functions (such as virus and spam filtering) to the cloud.

To read more about government agencies moving to the cloud, you can reference the full article here. We look forward to your comments and thoughts.

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Sendmail Speaks with BisNow FedTech About Developments in the Federal Market

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Barry Shurtz

Our VP of Federal, Jim Seaman, recently had the opportunity to speak with Sean Gallagher at BisNow FedTech.   The discussion focused on what Sendmail is doing in the government/federal space and I wanted to share some highlights from that conversation.

Cloud computing is rapidly gaining acceptance among government IT organizations and many agencies are aggressively looking to move IT services to the cloud. We believe that cloud computing for email is an IT adoption that is here to stay. In the federal government space, Sendmail is an enabler and we endorse the filtering and groupware layer as being good areas to outsource to a private cloud.

Sendmail’s Sentrion appliance enforces policies for email, such as preventing classified data loss, spam and more, for the US Senate, DOE, Executive Office of the President, NASA and NGA. Our platform allows large organizations to centralize these functions with add-ins from leading anti-virus and security vendors in the network backbone.

Jim said he really appreciated the opportunity to learn more about what Sean is hearing from companies in the federal space and he looks forward to continuing the conversation around this topic and sharing more news in the coming weeks around Sendmail’s efforts.

You can read the coverage in FedTech here and we look forward to your comments below.

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Sendmail and Harris Corporation Join Forces to Target “Cloud First” Policy of U.S. Federal Government and Enterprise Cloud Leaders

Posted on July 20, 2011 by Barry Shurtz

After much collaboration between Sendmail and Harris Corporation, today we are excited to announce a new service that addresses enterprise initiatives for cloud-based business critical email. Together the two companies have jointly developed an integrated email and messaging cloud service for commercial enterprises and government organizations that is based on the unique integration of the Sendmail Sentrion Message Processing Platform and the Harris Trusted Enterprise Cloud and the Harris Cyber Integration Center.

Enterprises face many challenges when moving email to the cloud, including security, multiple encryption requirements, managing machine generated email applications and more. The integrated enterprise-grade email and cloud infrastructure that we developed with Harris is designed for mission critical workflows that allows enterprises to meet the requirements for availability, security and performance that may not be met when enterprise email is running on a public cloud.

We are currently working with a number of large commercial organizations and federal agencies on deployments for the cloud email service.

Read the official announcement here.

And tomorrow, stay tuned for highlights from the event that we are hosting with Harris Corporation tomorrow, “Secure Email in the Cloud: Fact, Fiction and Reality”, in which industry leaders will be helping to sort fact from fiction when it comes to successfully migrating email to the cloud.

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You’re Invited!Sendmail and Harris Corporation Hosting Event to Discuss Secure Email in the Cloud

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Barry Shurtz

Next week, we will be hosting an event with Harris Corporation, an international communications and information technology company, to bring together industry experts to offer large commercial and government enterprises insights and advice around secure email in the cloud.  As part of the event, Sendmail and Harris will co-present “Secure Email in the Cloud: Fact, Fiction and Reality” in order to help organizations better understand the benefits and challenges associated with migrating email to the cloud.

Our very own Glen D. Vondrick, President and COO at Sendmail, as well as Jim Seaman, VP Federal at Sendmail, will speak with Rich Plane, Head of Engineering and Development from Harris Corporation on Thursday, July 21, 2011 from 5:00 – 7:00 p.m. ET at the Congressional Country Club.

We are thrilled to be hosting this event with Harris and look forward to a discussion that will help sort the facts from fiction and look at ways to successfully migrate email to the cloud, both safely and securely.

To register for the event, please complete the brief registration form here while there is still space!

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SecurityWeek: When to Deploy a Load Balancer for Email

Posted on June 30, 2011 by Greg Olsen

In my latest SecurityWeek column, “When to Deploy a Load Balancer for Email,” I discuss a common load balancer configuration, as well as where to deploy a load balancer. I’ve also highlighted some of the best practices for deploying them in the email infrastructure that include:

  1. Deploy a load balancer for mail submission agents that accept email messages from internal email clients
  2. Deploy a load balancer for MTA infrastructures used by high volume email generating applications
  3. On the inbound Internet gateway, use multiple MX records to do the load balancing

With these recommendations, I hope to help you leverage the technologies for their appropriate uses—Service levels should be maximized while providing the most robust configuration to handle outages.

Be sure to check out the full article here, and as always, we look forward to your comments below.

Posted in Barry Shurtz, Email Security, Greg Olsen, SecurityWeek | 1 Comment

SecurityWeek: The Other Things You Can Do with TLS

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Greg Olsen

If you’re familiar with Transport Layer Security (TLS), chances are you think of it as a simple means of securing the transmission of email between two mail transfer agents (MTAs) and the encryption of email. However, the near-universal feature of MTAs also provides features that many organizations don’t take advantage of when they could. Businesses will often face problems that have usually been solved with other technologies, but there are other features that will help reduce the risk of specific vulnerabilities and comply with regulations and industry best practices.

In my latest SecurityWeek column, “The Other Things You Can Do with TLS,” I highlighted some of the other things that can be done with TLS:

  • Setting policy on the strength of encryption used
  • Verifying identities of machines
  • Authenticating permission to relay email

Overall, TLS assists with internal threats of disclosure of sensitive and secret information in military, intelligence, and financial services when deployed internally. Businesses should be aware that it allows access to military-grade encryption and authentication that’s built into the way Internet email works and could reduce cost and complexity of other VPN solutions.

Be sure to check out the full article here and as always, we look forward to your comments below.

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SecurityWeek: Are you blocking your own email?

Posted on June 3, 2011 by Greg Olsen

It’s a problem that occurs frequently in the workplace—when legitimate email is discarded as spam, slipping under our radar. Insurance, mortgages, real estate, and private wealth management are just a few examples of industries that rely on a network of external independent agents to do business and this significantly impacts the way a firm designs its email infrastructure, permits use of the mail system, sets acceptable use policy, and deploys Internet gateway security. In my latest SecurityWeek column, “Are you blocking your own email?,” I shared the certain risks that companies run into when they utilize the services of external agents, leading to potentially losing legitimate email.

Here’s a snapshot of the risk that’s created when a firm utilizes the services of external agents:

  • Agents are usually using their own computers email clients, email accounts, and ISPs to send email.
  • The firm exercises no control over the email practices of the agents, when not doing work on behalf of the firm.
  • The agents are frequently ignorant of sender best practices.
  • The agents abuse the Internet email system out of ignorance.

The bottom line is that organizations can fight the battle against false positives in their organizations by following the strategies around mitigating these risks.

Be sure to check out the full article here and as always, we look forward to your comments below.

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SecurityWeek: Converged Infrastructure Implications for Email Security

Posted on May 23, 2011 by Greg Olsen

It seems to happen all too often – something that’s ‘old’ is all of a sudden new again. And recently, that’s the case around converged infrastructure in which it’s a new name for an old idea. Converged Infrastructure has been surging due to the demands of cloud computing and in my latest SecurityWeek column titled, “Converged Infrastructure Implications for Email Security,” I shared the challenges behind the dominate email security paradigm, also weaving in what the remaining challenges are for enterprises once you a virtual appliance is added to the picture.

The key takeaways around Converged Infrastructure as it relates to email security include:

  • Before cloud computing, the dominate paradigm for the delivery of email security infrastructure was the purpose-built email security appliance (physical server)
  • With cloud computing, the infrastructure is migrated to a SaaS provider for Internet mail, however, there is still a place for an email security infrastructure for the management of internal email security.
  • The data center is then converted to a cloud computing paradigm on a Converged Infrastructure computing fabric, everything is now virtualized and potentially changeable. This makes the old paradigm for email security with physical appliances obsolete.
  • Now add the virtual appliance, as the email security infrastructure must be virtualized along with everything else, and the new paradigm is for virtualized appliances to implement email security.
  • The virtual appliances brings the benefits of physical appliances but without the physical residence in the data center.  The cloud now provides the compute infrastructure.
  • With the virtual appliance, the remaining challenge is around the virtual email security appliances adapting to network topology changes.

The bottom line is that this trend toward Converged Infrastructure has important implications for the email security IT infrastructure and the Converged Infrastructure promises to bring an old paradigm to a new infrastructure. Companies benefit from the Converged Infrastructure paradigm because it locks in customers on their solutions without having IT buyers out there searching for the best of breed infrastructure.

Be sure to check out the full article here and as always, we look forward to your comments below.

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