In our series of blogs about the Modern Workspace, we’re exploring how the best and most successful businesses of the present day are delivering the best and most efficient goods or services to their customers.
You’ve read about malware, ransomware, cyber hacks and various other headline-grabbing horror stories, but with familiarity comes contempt. In this article we look at cyber resilience for email, and the need to have a strategy in place that fends off threats and minimises disruptions caused by email hacks.
Is the risk worth taking?
While it’s always the likes of British Airways, Marriot Hotels and CapitalOne that hit the headlines, millions of small businesses around the world and in the UK have been at best targeted by, and at worst affected by some kind of email breach.
Whether your business is in financial services, healthcare, legal, construction, manufacturing, services or any other industry, you’ll be facing all or some of the following issues that can present a challenge for the security of business email:
• An increasingly mobile workforce
• Busy users that, without meaning to, can cut corners
• Protecting sensitive client data
• The need for 100% email uptime
• Archiving and retention requirements
• The need to quickly respond to litigation and other information requests
• Co-ordinating sometimes sensitive activities between internal users and external parties
How should I prioritise priorities?
With pressure on budgets and so many priorities to juggle, we know that it’s not always easy to choose, deploy and manage everything that IT needs to get done.
Yet reputational damage for growing businesses can far outweigh the relatively modest investment needed to secure a robust, resilient strategy to secure business email. Not only this, but a best-in-class solution such as Mimecast provides a strategy for securing email that is easy to manage, lowers costs and is effective in preventing attacks before, minimising disruptions during, and recovering email after an attack. In short, it’s a robust, resilient and forward-thinking approach that befits an effective Modern Workspace through preventing associated downtime from an email security breach, or the reputational and financial damage as a result of data loss.
The bread and butter of email security
In the modern era, email is a weak point of business security. Because of this it’s increasingly vital to protect your organisation from spam, malware and phishing attacks. PAV has successfully worked with several of our customers to provide peace of mind in these areas and safeguard employee communications, reduce risk with targeted threat protection, data leak prevention, and enforced (but non-intrusive) security controls.
The level and sophistication of threats is also an increasing cause for concern, with impersonation techniques being employed to impersonate company executives, staff, partners and suppliers, customers, and well-known brands in order to gain access to your network via unsuspecting users. So while most email security solutions stop basic or well-known malware but fail to address more challenging email-borne threats, the threat remains to your business.
Email security and the Modern Workspace
In short, email security is almost the epitome of IT’s challenge with Modern Workspace requirements in that uptime is of crucial importance to the business, but this must be juggled with security precautions – in short, the dynamic and ever-increasing complexity of today’s email security threats coupled with the increasingly remote and distributed user base that IT departments are forced to contend.
How can PAV help?
To help cut across the industry jargon and provide the best and most relevant solutions for our customers, PAV has packaged all of our expertise and skills into a range of services called Modern Workspaces.
From listening to our customers’ needs, the principles that the Modern Workspaces concept has been built on some of the best-in-class technologies in the industry to provide your business with:
• The tools for optimised processes
• Seamless employee productivity and collaboration facilities
• Cost savings compared to legacy platforms
• Fit-for-purpose security measures
• And ultimately – the best in class experience for your customers.
