Email management reduces risks

IT Week: As chief of Marshal , a vendor of email controls and web security tools, do you think the need to comply with regulations is increasing demand for such products?

Ed Macnair: Compliance is a huge driver, but the type of regulation determines how you use the technology. If you look at regulations such as the US Hippa legislation or the UK Data Protection Act there is pressure to ensure data is kept confidential. In these cases, encryption products can help.

Are there other regulations that require email management systems?

The US Sarbanes-Oxley Act demands emails are retained, but the problem is to work out what to retain. We offer linguistical analysis tools in MailMarshal that look at email content and then enforce policies regarding whether it needs to be stored or not. For example, if it has a set type of attachment or is addressed from or to certain people, then it is automatically archived. Some large financial organisations also use MailMarshal to ensure traders can't email sensitive information to other departments.

Are there benefits from email management systems that go beyond compliance?

They also help mitigate the risk of data breaches. One of our customers is a household chemicals company that implemented MailMarshal and within a week discovered that two of its employees were leaking confidential data to its rivals. Intellectual property costs firms millions to develop and can be thrown away by employees very easily either on purpose or by accident.

These benefits are always difficult to quantify, are there more explicit cost benefits?

There is a cost and productivity argument. We surveyed some of our large banking customers and found that 71 percent of inbound email traffic was not business related and 97 percent of bandwidth was being used for non-business related activity. Email management systems can filter that out.

What benefits have you seen after spinning off from security management vendor NetIQ last year?

We've got dedicated focus again. Within NetIQ we were responsible for eight percent of revenues so had eight percent of resources, which didn't amount to a lot in terms of development. One of the first things I've done is double the size of the development team to nearly 40 people.

What else has changed?

We'll deliver a much faster update cycle for our email and web security products and we've also launched a new dedicated threat assessment team and are setting up a threat assessment web site to give security professionals a central repository for information on all IT threats.

How would you summarise Marshal's web security portfolio?

WebMarshal uses a similar app-roach to MailMarshal to look at web traffic and help identify and stop threats. It stops viruses entering via the web and prevents confidential data leaving via the same channel.