Cloudmark Gateway for Hosted Messaging Providers
Comprehensive Messaging Security and Policy Management
Given the increasingly critical importance of e-mail as a corporate communications medium, many organizations are turning to outsourced service providers to manage their messaging environment and infrastructure and provide higher levels of reliability, security, messaging capabilities and system performance.
For hosted messaging providers, that exciting opportunity also means higher volumes of traffic and greater demand for archiving, bandwidth, and processing resources. Providers must prepare to scale up, respond to these demands, and meet the contractual obligations of their service level agreements (SLAs). One key strategy is to deploy accurate filtering and removal of message-borne malware before it impacts the messaging infrastructure. That lessens the load on the messaging infrastructure and improves the customer e-mail experience.
Cloudmark Gateway can perform intelligent protocol and content filtering at the perimeter of the hosted messaging environment. Tightly integrated with Cloudmark Authority™, Cloudmark Gateway blocks 98 percent of unwanted e-mail traffic before it impacts internal storage and message queues. The result: dramatically lower infrastructure requirements and a higher quality of service for business customers.
Integrates with any Existing Infrastructure
As an edge solution, Cloudmark Gateway fully leverages existing infrastructure and can be deployed without any service interruption. Cloudmark Gateway works seamlessly in these hosted environments:
- Microsoft® Exchange
- IBM® Lotus Notes/Domino
- Novell® GroupWise
- Open source messaging solutions
Highest Accuracy
Cloudmark Gateway integrates with Cloudmark Authority — the industry’s fastest and most accurate messaging security solution. Cloudmark Authority identifies and removes spam, phishing, viruses, and other threats with greater than 98 percent accuracy and near-zero false positives. It uses Advanced Message Fingerprinting™ algorithms along with corroborated reporting from the Cloudmark Global Threat Network to automatically detect and block the widest range of messaging threats.
Customized Security Policies
Cloudmark Gateway’s flexible policy-management engine lets carriers and service providers offer individualized e-mail handling to all business customers. Cloudmark Gateway supports a wide range of policies at the workgroup or company level to meet customers’ specific security requirements. For example, providers can automatically prevent “company confidential” messages from being delivered outside a specific domain, thereby ensuring stricter compliance to company policies.
System Reliability
High availability and reliability are critical to any managed environment. Through a clustered configuration, with shared intelligence, policy control, and dynamic failover across the cluster Cloudmark Gateway helps providers deliver the highest service levels at all times. In addition, Cloudmark Authority maintains a local cache of threat fingerprints for full redundancy and independence. That means message filtering continues uninterrupted (using locally cached updates) even if connectivity to the Cloudmark updates server is temporarily lost.
Unmatched Performance and Scalability
Each Cloudmark Gateway server can process more than 3 million messages per hour — that’s 20 times faster than competitive solutions while consuming less than a tenth of the CPU resources required by traditional filtering techniques.
Cloudmark Gateway Key Features and Benefits
| Features | Benefits |
|---|---|
Directory Integration for Policies | Cloudmark Gateway implements policies based on directory entries. That means hosted messaging providers can deliver flexible policies at the domain level for services customized to the needs of individual businesses. |
Policy Management Engine | Cloudmark Gateway’s policy management engine ties into LDAP and other repositories to support custom rules, whitelists/blacklists, sender authentication, and other policies. |
Intelligent Flow Control | Cloudmark Gateway performs intelligent rate limiting, RBLs, tarpitting, traffic shaping, and other techniques to control messaging flows and minimize the impact of malicious messages on the infrastructure. |
Full Content Filtering at the Edge | Cloudmark Gateway can run Cloudmark Authority’s comprehensive anti-spam, anti-phishing, and anti-virus solution at the protocol or at the content-filtering stage. Authority’s industry-leading filtering significantly lowers operational and infrastructure costs and improves customer satisfaction. |
Centralized Administration and Management | Global cluster configuration and policy management saves valuable time for administrators. It presents consolidated views across the cluster and monitor server states and activities through an easy-to-use interface, enabling early detection of delivery problems or abuse. |
Reporting and Analytics | Use either the simple Web-based interface or powerful command line interface to tap into management reporting. Cloudmark Gateway software supports SNMP reporting, allowing easy integration with existing monitoring systems. It also provides live traffic analytics through a Web interface, including comprehensive tabular and graphical reports that can be exported into various formats. |
Extensible Platform | The flexible Cloudmark Gateway platform is fully extensible. Through a standard, well-documented API, Cloudmark Gateway can easily integrate with third-party or custom business applications for billing, network provisioning, and support. |
To find out more about how Cloudmark Gateway and Cloudmark Authority can help your managed services business, please contact us at sales@cloudmark.com.