ANTenna Blog -- Networking & Communications

Email has delivered a tremendous productivity boom to small and medium businesses. But as its use has increased, it has become more difficult to manage. One of the industry’s leading networking companies has decided to throw its hat into the managed email security space, thus providing companies with more service choices.

Cisco has been morphing from a networking company into a general purpose IT supplier. As evidence of that shift, the company announced its first suite of managed email security services. The Cisco IronPort Email Security services are designed to protect businesses against spam, viruses, and blended threats. The hybrid solution delivers unified centralized reporting, message tracking and quarantining. Companies can access a management console if they want to monitor what is happening with their email messages themselves. The service is flexible: customers can pick from three options: a hosted system, a managed service with the equipment stationed on the customer’s premises, or a hybrid version.

Cisco is moving into a growing area. Small and medium businesses have seen their email usage increase – in some cases quite dramatically -- during the past few years. Rather than continue to try and perform tasks, such as blocking spam, they have been looking to hand those functions over to third parties. As this change has occurred, many of the traditional security vendors, such as MX Logic, McAfee, WebSense and Webroot, have moved into the email security service space. In addition, email outsourcing suppliers, such as Google and Symantec, have started to move beyond offering simple mail services into various types of security services. Cisco seems to recognize that it is important for the company to develop such services since it wants to become a key IT infrastructure supplier in the future.

Cisco’s offering will gain interest among small and medium businesses simply because of the company’s name recognition. How well the vendor’s service will perform is certainly unclear at the moment, but companies have gained one more choice for email security services.