The company says e-mail security threats have evolved so far and so fast that the job of the mail administrator has changed fundamentally, and it has upgraded its e-mail appliances to keep pace.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [January 30, 2008]

San Bruno, Calif.-based IronPort, a business unit of Cisco Systems, announced an upgrade to its M-Series security management appliance. Abhay Rajaram, IronPort senior product manager, says that the appliances have been designed to enable the mail administrator to do more.

"Three years ago, the administrator just had to keep the fires running," says Rajaram. "Now, the administrator need to provide scalable, robust e-mail with usable security. What the administrator does now is very different from what they did three years ago."

New features
These new job functions are highlighted in three key feature changes in the IronPort M-Series:

First, the appliance gives the administrator a centralized view into e-mail performance (see screen shot above). The reports are designed to provide information that is actionable. Given a company's investment in its e-mail infrastructure, and the complexity of that infrastructure, the administrator has to know how its working in real time and to be able to locate and fix problems immediately if they occur.

Second, there is a centralized message tracking capability with a sophisticated search feature (see screen shot below), all built to answer that perennial user question, "where's my e-mail?" An expensive e-mail infrastructure can look inadequate quite quickly if one customer cannot locate one key e-mail.

Third, IronPort has reinforced the product's Data Loss Prevention (DLP) features. It can now better enforce company policies concerning what information can and cannot be disclosed. These days, even a simple e-mailed invoice could contain valuable competitive intelligence.

Pricing and availability
The IronPort M-Series is available now. Pricing is not disclosed.

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