CGNET Gatekeeper Moves to Symantec Hosted Mail Security

This year, CGNET is improving its Gatekeeper anti-spam/anti-virus email protection service by incorporating Symantec Hosted Mail Security. The new system has several advantages, both for customers and for CGNET.

For several years, CGNET used Brightmail Anti-Spam and Trend Micro Internet Virus Wall as its anti-spam and anti-virus engines in Gatekeeper. The two services were applied on servers at CGNET, as mail destined for our clients was routed through our servers first, for virus removal, spam quarantining and backup.

In 2005, Symantec acquired Brightmail. It has now incorporated the Brightmail service into its Hosted Mail Security service. Symantec Hosted Mail Security functions very much like CGNET’s former system, except that the anti-spam and anti-virus procedures take place at Symantec’s Tier 4 data centers. The mail is then routed to CGNET for backup, and then on to our clients.

New Benefits
Users are seeing new benefits:

• Increased Visibility: Notification of quarantined mail is sent to users, including the ability to review quarantined messages.
• Personalized Control: Users can set several options about how their quarantined mail is handled, including how long it is held, frequency of email notifications, and ability to specify blocked addresses.
• Greater Reliability: Mail is processed using highly redundant IT facilities, with instantaneous failover to alternative sites.

CGNET is also benefiting from the new configuration, because spam and viruses are intercepted before the mail is routed to CGNET’s servers. This reduces demands on our bandwidth, given that spam now accounts for more than 80 percent of all Internet email traffic. CGNET has also been able to reduce the number of servers used for anti-spam and anti-virus email processing.

In general, the benefits of a hosted anti-spam/anti-virus solution are becoming apparent. Both CGNET and its users save bandwidth and processing cycles, compared to installing these services in house. And users gain a convenient, easy-to-use system backed up by CGNET’s 24/7/365 end-user support.

CGNET clients currently using an in-house system might consider how moving to a hosted service such as Gatekeeper would provide these benefits to them, as well.