MessageLabs Offers E-Mail, Web Security for SMBs

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MessageLabs announced Nov. 29 that it has launched a new set of messaging and Web security services for small and midsize businesses.

MessageLabs Small Business Solutions is designed to focus on security challenges that SMBs face such as the increasing sophistication and volume of threats, limited IT resources and budget, and lack of in-depth security expertise, according to the company.

The new services will use MessageLabs Skeptic technology to offer protection from e-mail and Web threats while also including an enterprise-class managed, multilayered, scalable solution for anti-virus, anti-spam, anti-phishing, anti-spyware and URL filtering, the company said.

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Brian Czarny, vice president of product management for MessageLabs, based in New York, told eWEEK that Skeptic “uses a range of patented techniques that leverage traffic pattern recognition, reputation information, heuristics, file pattern recognition and other measures to essentially form an opinion of each file that passes through our network. Those files that have opinions that score above a certain threshold based on the number of criteria and characteristics related to threats are then stopped.”

The services will also use Converged Threat Analysis to take recent threat and reputation information from other communications channels such as e-mail and utilize that knowledge to help protect MessageLabs customers.

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“Our Small Business Solutions [offering] incorporates all of the knowledge and experience we have gathered through years of proven threat protection and management of e-mail and Web traffic with our understanding of the needs and hurdles faced by companies of this size,” Jos White, president of MessageLabs, said in a company release.

Small Business Solutions could benefit SMBs in the following ways, he said:

• Help free up IT resources to concentrate on projects associated with business objectives
• Enhance the overall security of SMBs
• Allow businesses to be protected going into the future
• Reduce staffing, hardware and software costs

Czarny said, “This solution enables easy set-up, simple management with one set of reporting, [and] one number for 24/7 support, and is easily scalable and requires no hardware or software investment.”

MessageLabs Small Business Solutions is available today for $4.85 per user.

Editors Note: This story was updated to provide more details on MessageLabs Skeptic technology.

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