Cloudmark Announces Cloudmark Gateway for High-Performance Protocol and Content Filtering at the Edge of the Network
Cloudmark Gateway Running Cloudmark Authority Offers the Industry's Highest-Performing and Most Accurate Edge Messaging Security Solution; Cloudmark Now Offers End-to-End Messaging Security Infrastructure for Service Providers
San Francisco, May 30, 2007 – Cloudmark, Inc., the global leader in carrier-grade messaging security, today announced Cloudmark Gateway™, a high-performance edge mail transfer agent (MTA) that integrates seamlessly with Cloudmark Authority™, the company's comprehensive messaging security solution. Cloudmark Gateway and Cloudmark Authority together offer the market's fastest, most complete message filtering solution. The Cloudmark Gateway edge solution is available in a software or an appliance configuration based on the customer's desired implementation scheme. Designed for carrier-class deployments, Cloudmark Gateway delivers complete control over message handling and policy enforcement at the edge of the network. As a result, the majority of unwanted email traffic is captured before it impacts internal messaging infrastructure and storage, significantly reducing overall system costs for service providers.
Cloudmark Gateway is already in use at over a dozen tier one service providers and enterprises in the U.S., Europe and Asia Pacific.
Swisscom will be deploying Cloudmark Gateway in its core messaging infrastructure. "The growing volume and sophistication of messaging threats means that accurate content filtering is more important than ever," said Felix Graf, head of TV/Portal, Swisscom Fixnet, Residential. "We are committed to providing the best user experience in the Swiss market; eliminating spam, phishing and viruses is vital to keeping our subscribers satisfied."
"We have been using Cloudmark Authority for several years and were extremely impressed with the accuracy of Authority's content filtering," said Ben Nunez, president of XIF Communications, a U.S.-based hosting company. "This month, we added Cloudmark Gateway in order to allow for architectural flexibility in expanding our hosting business and are extremely impressed with the processing speed and performance of the combined solution. Further, Cloudmark Gateway has helped us consolidate and centralize our messaging security infrastructure, enabling us to move from using multiple different servers dedicated to each customer to a single, redundant device that handles traffic for all of our messaging customers."
Today, most service providers combine an internal set of MTAs with a layer of edge MTAs to route email traffic coming into their organizations. The goal of an edge solution is to reduce email volume on the system at the network's edge by rejecting bad messages before they have a chance to clog internal messaging infrastructures. However, with spam, phishing and viruses now accounting for more than 95 percent of all service provider email traffic, increasing demands are being placed on both edge and internal MTAs. Traditional edge MTAs have not been able to keep up with the growing rate and sophistication of today's messaging abuse as they provide only rudimentary, protocol-level filtering to weed out spam. In addition, traditional MTAs are not equipped to block the majority of bad email traffic because they do not have the capabilities to apply advanced policies or full content filtering without significantly degrading system performance. As a result, edge MTAs are only effective in filtering 50-70 percent of all email traffic--the rest still gets through to service providers' messaging infrastructures.
Cloudmark Gateway integrates with Cloudmark Authority, the industry's fastest and most accurate messaging security solution. Cloudmark Gateway is able to run full Cloudmark Authority content filtering, not just IP filtering, at the edge of the network. In addition, Cloudmark Gateway is the first MTA to deliver rich policy capabilities at the edge--service provider-defined policies can be applied at the SMTP stage, before messages are accepted, or at the content stage, once the message has been received. Specific threat mitigation techniques, including anti-denial of service, traffic shaping and connection throttling, can be also be applied to limit all forms of messaging abuse. Cloudmark Gateway is designed for easy integration with existing infrastructure, third-party applications and legacy systems.
Each Cloudmark Gateway server processes more than 3 million messages per hour with full spam, phishing and virus filtering. Cloudmark Gateway, leveraging Cloudmark Authority content filtering, processes messages 20-40 times faster than other edge solutions running content filtering. The result is an edge solution able to stop 90-96 percent of total email traffic, reducing the amount of spam getting into internal infrastructures from 30-40 percent to only 4-6 percent. For service providers, Cloudmark Gateway significantly reduces the impact of spam and other forms of messaging abuse on their messaging infrastructure and storage, leading to higher customer satisfaction and operational and infrastructure cost savings.
"Previous generations of edge MTAs were not intended to handle the scale of today's spam problem," said Vipul Ved Prakash, founder and chief scientist of Cloudmark. "Cloudmark Gateway responds to the problem in a way that is both relevant to today's threats and forward looking to prepare for threats on the horizon. In addition to reducing overall traffic, service providers using Cloudmark Gateway are able to severely restrict connection attempts, which discourage attackers from targeting their network in the future. The economics of spam are such that when Cloudmark Gateway throttles incoming messages or rejects them all together, the sender, often a zombie machine, moves on to an easier target."
The Cloudmark Gateway software-based configuration is powered by Message Systems, a leading provider of scalable and high-performing email software solutions designed for the world's largest service provider networks. The appliance-based configuration is powered by Bizanga, which builds and delivers a new generation of message processing and email security platform providing a scalable and full-featured email processing system.
About Cloudmark Authority
Cloudmark Authority leverages Advanced Message Fingerprinting TM technology based on innovative, high-performance algorithms and real-time, corroborated feedback from the Cloudmark Global Threat Network to stop spam, phishing and viruses with greater than 98 percent accuracy and near zero false positives. Inbound and outbound messages are checked against an in-memory cache of verified fingerprints that is updated every 45 seconds, delivering security intelligence and filtering at all points in the messaging infrastructure and providing customers with greater operational efficiency. In just the past year, seven of the top ten ISPs/carriers in North America selected Cloudmark Authority to protect millions of consumers from spam, phishing and virus threats.
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark protects 2 billion global subscribers daily from an explosion in messaging abuses across more operator networks than anyone else. Only Cloudmark defends the world’s largest Mobile, Fixed and Social Media Providers, including AT&T, Comcast, MySpace, NTT, Swisscom and Time Warner Cable, with scalable and accurate protection against the widest range of existing and emerging messaging threats.