This announcement shows that even the largest ISPs are looking for hosted services, and also that Cloudmark has found a path to the small business customer through a webhosting channel.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [February 4, 2009]

San Francisco, Calif.-based Cloudmark has announced the launch of CloudFilter, a hosted e-mail security solution designed for webhosts and ISPs at the Parallels Summit 2009, in Las Vegas.

"The product delivers anti-spam, anti-phishing, and anti-virus with Cloudmark's high degree of accuracy," says Cloudmark CTO Jamie de Guerre. He says that even large ISP customers, which traditionally license software and run it in house, have been asking for an outsourced solution for e-mail security.

"The customer points their MX record to the CloudFilter IP space. The e-mail comes to us, and we scan it and deliver legitimate e-mail to the service provider."

Aren't ISPs large and small concerned with the reputation of their domain and IP space? Other solutions that required that ISPs send their e-mail through others' servers encountered stiff resistance in the past, no matter how good the product (i.e., MessageLabs, which is now part of Symantec).

"There are some smaller ISPs that have done a great job of [keeping a clean domain] and some larger ones that have done a pretty good job of it. MessageLabs and Postini never offered outbound services. We will be providing outbound filtering, effectively stopping spam from coming out of their network."

[Update: Google contacted us to say that they have provided "outbound anti-virus and content filtering since 2003, and added outbound spam filtering in Q4 2008."]

Where will your data centers be? Surely customers want low-latency access? "So far," says de Guerre, "we have two data centers in North America and plans for one in London and one in Hong Kong." Data centers were chosen on the basis of the company's relationship with the data center owner. In addition, de Guerre says, the company chose a Hong Kong location (as opposed to Singapore or Tokyo) because that's what customers in mainland China prefer.

Cloudmark doesn't need the kind of equipment that Google uses to run Gmail, de Guerre notes, because it's scanning the e-mail and passing it on. There's no massive e-mail storage, and no user interfaces, except for webmail, which the service provider takes care of.

What about keeping track of users? CloudFilter works with the webhost's control panel. For service providers, which may have more complex or proprietary provisioning systems, Cloudmark obtains provisioning data by working with the service provider. "Our team has a lot of experience," de Guerre says. "Our team includes people who have worked at OpenWave and Critical Path."

What distinguishes your cloud from others? "Our software is based on leading edge technology," de Guerre says. "We deliver 20 to 25 times the throughput of traditional e-mail security technologies. We deliver additional efficiencies based on our reputation server [Cloudmark Sender Intelligence (CSI)] and how we're able to effectively slow down spammers sending to the platform."

CSI has been recently upgraded, and now identifies trusted senders in addition to bad senders and regular senders. The company speeds up mail from good senders and slows it down for bad senders and for those in another new category: suspect senders.

Pricing and availability
Cloudmark's CloudFilter is available now. Pricing is based on the business model of the webhost or ISP, de Guerre says. Pricing for webhosts is generally per domain and for ISPs is generally per subscriber. Pricing details are not disclosed.

—End