Messaging Gateway

I keep hearing this question ever so often and thought it might be a good idea to pen down my few words of wisdom. To start with let us assume that we are looking at a fairly large enterprise with sufficient number of users to justify investment in a Secured Mail Gateway. I must add that the introduction of a soft appliance has reduced the CAPEX significantly, however if you are running a Microsoft Exchange Server with 100 users you might still just want to use SMS for Exchange.

Let us start with the Gateway Offering- Symantec Messaging Gateway as this is the most feature rich mail security offering from Symantec. SMG provides a gamut of Anti Spam technologies.

• Adaptive Reputation- Manual, Self Learning Local, Global, and Third Party Blacklists, Manual, Self Learning Fast Pass, Global and Third Party Whitelists.
• Self Learning Local blacklist saves bandwidth by throttling connections from spammers where as Self Learning Fastpass saves resources by bypassing spam filtering for clean senders.
• Signature and Heuristics based Antispam Engine capable of Message Body & Attachment Signature based Analysis, Fuzzy Body Hash Analysis, URL Filtering, Message Header, Content, Language, Structural, and Image Analysis.
• Bounce Attack Prevention.
• SPF, SenderID, DKIM, and Reverse DNS validation capabilities.
• Language based filtering.

SMG provides best in the industry Antivirus with zero day suspicious attachment detection and bloodhound heuristic capabilities apart from the signature based virus detection.

The Antispam and Antivirus signatures are updated automatically in real time.

SMG also provides comprehensive Content Filtering and Data Loss Prevention capabilities with a lot of out of the box policies to meet your regulatory and compliance requirements.

Finally SMG can be integrated with Symantec DLP, PGP Universal Gateway, and Symantec Content Encryption Solutions.

In shot SMG offers everything that you would want from a perimeter Email Gateway.

So does this mean that SMG is the way to go for large enterprises. Not quite as there are a few interesting capabilities that SMS for Exchange offers. Let uss look at a few

• Virus Filtering for internal Emails.
• Integration with Exchange Junkmail via SCL values
• Content Filtering for internal Emails.
• Scanning of mailboxes with new virus signatures.
• Removing unwanted content from mailboxes based on content policies.
• Remove sensitive content distributed accidently from mailboxes.
• Reply All Mailstorm and internal outbreak detection and containment.
• Ensuring Clean Backups.

You might want to take a look at the following article written by me earlier: -

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/symantec-mail-security-microsoft-exchange-best-practices

So we can conclude that both these products complement each other with their capabilities. While some of their capabilities overlap, others are unique. Deploying and configuring these capabilities correctly will ensure a truly secured email environment.