By Sam | January 27, 2014

Quick Tips For Understanding Email Filtering In A Hosted Exchange Environment

Tens of thousands of emails enter your Credit Union each day. Most are innocuous and present no threat to your Credit Union.  As a Credit Union CIO, you have probably spent years building the “fort” around your infrastructure – especially email. You developed your defense strategies by implementing strong policies, anti-virus/malware protection and email filtering tools. But what happens when you move your email to a hosted environment?  Are you still protected?  In today’s post, we will talk about email filtering best practices in a hosted exchange environment.

As an ex-VP/IT of a large Credit Union, I remember the pressure to keep threats out.  At times the “tens of thousands” of emails reminded me of the 10,000 ORCs faced by the great warrior King Aragorn at Black Gate. And like him, I would start my day with a silent vow to protect my Credit Union  – “A day may come when the courage of men fails … (sic) … but it is not this day!”  (ok, a bit dramatic but the threats were real and unceasing!) As I moved my critical IT servers/services to a hosted environment it was imperative that the security we currently had met or EXCEEDED what I could do in-house.

Moving to a hosted environment for Microsoft Exchange will not weaken your email filtering approach if done properly. I took this topic to our CTO, Hugh Smallwood and want to share forward these important tips:

• Outlook provides email filtering. This is a native function of Outlook. Rules can be established both globally and locally by the end user. To have more control over email filtering you would need a tool designed for that.
• At Ongoing Operations, our hosted Exchange solution uses Iron Port. Aside from blocking the standard executable file types it also provides enhanced functionality like spam/malware detection.
• If an email comes in with a virus it will get stripped from the message.  The user will get the message with a note that the attachment has been stripped.  We will not let them get the attachment if it has a virus. Notification and retrieval are important concepts to make sure you clearly understand what your provider is capable of.
• Your hosting provider should be able to provide you a list of extensions that are blocked by their filtering tool

The key to any good security/protection strategy is understanding what is available and how to use/implement the tools. We’d be happy to help assess your strategies!

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