May 11, 2007

FEATURE EDITORIAL

The Perfect CIO Storm

While attending WorldSecure 2007 conference this week, I attended a keynote by Gordon F. Jones, the former CIO of Franklin Templeton Group, CIO of Toysrus.com, CIO of Novell, and VP of IT for eBay. He is currently a consultant. His talk was an interesting look at the variety of demands placed on IT infrastructure and staff, in particular CIOs.

He noted how IT infrastructure has to be secure, available, extensible, operate efficiently, be compliant and scalable. But the slide that caught my eye and imagination was his analogy of the movie, A Perfect Storm, where events happened in just such a sequence as to create a disaster. His CIO Perfect Storm as he described it included infrastructure demands; phishing; privacy issues; spam, virus, and worms; increased compliance requirements, insurance liability, all the while enabling new products and services. It was quite a daunting picture, especially given the amount of external security threats and regulatory pressures currently happening. How many IT organizations will experience a perfect storm? Jones continued to relay a handful of items that should be of concern - these included loss of confidential company information; leaks of regulated, private customer information; loss of productivity and IT efficiency; overloading and downtime; increased complexity from managing multiple security point-products; and lack of funding, among others. He admitted that managing email security is getting harder, yet must be diligently managed because it is mission critical with 21 percent of a company's intellectual property residing on email.

WorldSecure 2007, is Tumbleweed Communication's annual worldwide user conference, and took place May 6 - 9 at Loews Coronado Bay Resort in San Diego, Calif. The conference offered the latest in messaging security and managed file transfer trends, along with sessions for enhancing technical knowledge on how to best manage messaging security and managed file transfer initiatives and technologies. The WorldSecure agenda featured industry speakers, in-depth tech sessions, individualized one-on-one security consultations, product roadmap insights, along with free training and networking. Additional speakers and moderators besides Jones were Peter Firstbrook, research director, Security & Privacy for Gartner, the exuberant L. Frank Kenney, research director, Application Development & Integration for Gartner, Christian Christiansen, program vice president, Security Group for IDC and Michael D. Osterman, principal, Osterman Research, Inc. Also present were a variety of Tumbleweed's own personnel, including Jim Scullion, CEO and Taher Elgamal, CTO.

Message Systems Releases New Version of Email Solution

Email software solutions provider Message Systems announced this week the newest version of its email solution. The company says that version 2.2 builds on Message Systems clustering capability with the addition of a Web-based user interface that provides system administrators with visibility into cluster operations for real-time analysis.

"Email solutions running in a clustered environment provide a number of benefits to corporations, ISPs and ESPs, including ease of configuration and management, quality of service, high availability and on-demand analysis," says Barry Abel, vice president of field operations for Message Systems. "With Message Systems 2.2, we also provide the Web-based Cluster Console so that systems administrators can visually monitor cluster metrics in real-time and make immediate policy changes to ensure continued high-performance."

According to Abel, the Message Systems Cluster Console displays metrics on connections, deliverability and bounce data to help administrators maintain a high quality of service. He says analysis is straightforward and corrective actions can be immediately implemented, from reallocating resources to adjusting traffic flow to implementing new policies in order to deal with emerging threats.

Message Systems 2.2 is compliant with the proposed Domain Keys Identified Email (DKIM) authentication standard for senders and receivers as well as Microsoft's Sender ID email authentication technology protocol. It also includes support for the Authentication, Authorization and Accounting (AAA) security protocol to allow administrators to control user access to servers based on defined roles.

Product Availability

Message Systems 2.2 will be available at the end of the second quarter in 2007.

Scalix Joins Red Hat Exchange

Scalix Corporation, a provider of enterprise messaging solutions based on Linux and open source, and Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, announced yesterday that Scalix has joined the newly launched Red Hat Exchange (RHX). This marks another milestone in Scalix's worldwide channel expansion strategy. RHX, which was declared open for business yesterday, offers subscriptions to open source solution suites, which will be sold by value added resellers. Scalix will offer a new subscription version of its award-winning Small Business Edition email and calendaring solution on Red Hat Exchange.

"The Scalix enterprise email and calendaring solution is a core part of an organization's IT infrastructure and has a high level of touch with other elements in the infrastructure," Glenn Winokur, Scalix chief executive officer said in a statement. "The Red Hat vision of offering 'pre-baked' solution suites, as well as a single point of contact, will drive risk and complexity out of the equation for businesses and make it easier for them to adopt business-critical Linux applications."

The Scalix product will be available for purchase on RHX this summer.

MESSAGING NEWS Readers Save $100 on INBOX Event

The Messaging Industry Event May 31 - June 1, 2007

Email is the driving force in today's businesses. However, email has also become a problem for many -- how does one manage/limit spam? How can one use email more effectively, yet responsibly, for marketing? What new technologies are available that can solve these problems and make businesses run more productively and profitably? The event will cover these questions plus many more topics, including messaging, collaboration, emerging technologies, e-marketing, social media, voice communication, security, privacy, compliance, and business development. Click here for complete event information.

INBOX: The Messaging Industry Event, is being held at the San Jose Marriott, in San Jose, Calif. from May 31 - June 1. Messaging News' readers can save $100 on a Full-Conference Pass or get a Buyer Pass for free. Register with customer code MNM7.

We welcome your ideas and your news for Messaging Newswire’s News & Trends in Email Security. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to editorial@messagingnews.com. Written or compiled by Stephanie Jordan. All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

For marketing information on this newsletter or other Messaging News products contact jvictor@messagingnews.com