Message Compliance

James Hamilton is General Manager of Exchange Hosted Services (EHS), at Microsoft Corporation, the worldwide leader in software, services and solutions. During the past year, James has been specifically focused on Exchange Hosted Services, formerly known as FrontBridge Technologies, Inc., a leading provider of managed services that address corporate e-mail security, compliance and availability requirements. With a diverse industry background that spans 19 years, James has leveraged his outstanding abilities as a senior software leader to design, develop and reliably deliver successful, high volume systems software products. (www.research.microsoft.com/~jamesrh)

BMUS. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reports that as much as 75 percent of most companies’ intellectual property is contained in the messages and attachments they send through their e-mail systems. Why does this require a new approach to e-mail management?
JH. E-mail has evolved from a simple communication tool into a mission critical application that supports all aspects of business. At the same time, e-mail threats through viruses, spam, and other forms of malware, has grown in both number and complexity. At the peak of the Sober virus attack, the day-over-day message traffic at Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services was up 320 percent with 97.9 percent of the total message flow that day being virus, spam and phishing traffic.

Because e-mail is now a primary form of business communication, security, compliance, knowledge management and disaster recovery are key areas of focus for all responsible organizations.

To manage this growing business problem, Exchange Hosted Services (EHS) delivers a cost-effective way for enterprises to actively ensure the security and availability of their messaging environment, while instilling confidence that their messaging processes satisfy internal policy and regulatory compliance requirements.

One of Microsoft’s distinct solutions, Exchange Hosted Filtering, is designed to help manage this new approach required for e-mail management. Exchange Hosted Filtering incorporates multiple filters to actively help protect businesses’ inbound and outbound e-mail from spam, viruses, phishing scams, and e-mail policy violations; this service employs multilayered defenses to help block e-mail malware from reaching your corporate gateway. In addition, the service provides both rich tools for writing rules to help enforce corporate and regulatory policies governing e-mail usage and disaster recovery tools to queue mail for delivery in the event of an e-mail server outage.
The Exchange Hosted Filtering solution has the ability to manage that risk, as the service provides both rich tools for writing rules that help satisfy corporate and regulatory policies governing e-mail usage, along with creating disaster recovery tools to queue mail for delivery in the event of an e-mail server or network outage.

Utilizing fully managed messaging services, like those provided by Exchange Hosted Services can deliver value to corporate customers by requiring no upfront capital investment, minimal IT management overhead and risk, and enable customers to focus their resources on areas that directly impact growth for their business such as increasing customer satisfaction and driving innovation.

BMUS. With regulatory pressures increasing all the time, the security and availability of electronic messages has never been more important. What challenges do companies face in terms of meeting ever more stringent compliance requirements?
JH. While meeting compliance requirements is of utmost importance, particularly for customers in the financial services, healthcare and the legal industries, all businesses today must maintain electronic records often for long periods of time, which is a huge tax on their people and systems.

To meet these requirements, businesses can greatly benefit from our Exchange Hosted Archiving services, an advanced message archiving system for e-mail and instant messages. This service is designed to help enterprise comply with regulatory, corporate governance requirements and legal demands placed on their electronic communication systems, while providing support with requirements for e-mail retention, retrieval and reporting purposes.

For regulated companies, a specific requirement might be that messages are automatically sampled by certain keywords or random percentage for routine monitoring (e.g. NASD 3010) and there are often specific retention requirements as well. For all companies, including those in non-regulated industries, an indexed and searchable archive is essential for retrieving messages required in legal discovery cases. Exchange Hosted Archiving services will allow organizations to meet these requirements.

It’s not surprising that regulated as well as non-regulated companies are looking for help with the complicated tasks of retaining, retrieving and reporting on electronic communications. When investigating options, it is important for businesses to look for a solution, such as Exchange Hosted Services that combines products, services and tools that can ensure their corporate e-mail systems are secure, and meet appropriate internal and external compliance regulations.

BMUS. And what messaging solutions are emerging to ensure greater compliance, security and continuity?
JH. Customers today want flexibility and choice in how their messaging solutions are delivered and maintained. No matter the size, businesses are increasing using a combination of an on-premise, such as Microsoft Exchange Server, and a hosted managed messaging solution, such as Exchange Hosted Services, to meet their customized needs.

In addition to Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Filtering solution, Exchange Hosted Encryption, one of four distinct EHS solutions, is an additional service to help further ensure a secure messaging environment. Exchange Hosted Encryption offers convenient, easy-to-use e-mail encryption service that helps to safely deliver an organization’s confidential business communications and enables users to send and receive encrypted e-mail directly from their desktops as easily as regular e-mail. As a result, users can encrypt and deliver any business communication without complex hardware and software to purchase, configure, and maintain.

As e-mail has become a mission critical application for organizations today, it is also imperative that their messaging environment is highly available. Microsoft’s Exchange Hosted Continuity provides always-on access to e-mail along with providing an effective back-up messaging system that can be called into action at anytime. In addition, this service provides a security-enhanced and intuitive Web interface through which users can access their previous 30 days of e-mail and can compose and send new messages in real time during a primary mail system outage. When the system is back online, messages are automatically merged back into the primary mail system.

BMUS. Over the last 18 months, instant messaging has emerged as an increasingly popular form of business communication. What security and/or compliance issues does IM present to IT departments? How do these differ from the challenges posed by e-mail?
JH. As the use of instant messaging (IM) as a corporate communication vehicle with customers and partners grows, a proactive approach to IM security and retention policies that protect the enterprise and comply with regulatory standards is equally important. Many businesses have adopted one or more of the public IM networks for use inside the organization. These public IM clients do not offer the ability to log and archive the transactions, which is often required to meet record retention or disclosure requirements. For example, NASD 3010 requires monitoring of electronic communications including e-mail and IM.

As IM messages are received, messages can be copied directly to the Exchange Hosted Archive, which assigns a unique serial number and timestamp. These stored messages can be searched by subject line, header, and message body with more than 200 attachment file types.

Overall, companies have a range of options to enforce their corporate security standards – including on-premise solutions such as Microsoft’s Live Communications Server, and hosted services such as Exchange Hosted Services, which offers an industry leading solution compatible with many hosted IM solutions.

BMUS. What best practices should be employed to help IT departments meet the growing challenge of message archiving, search and retrieval? What advice would you offer to companies looking to overhaul their approach?
JH. First, we recommend assessing in-house IT to ensure the focus is on overall company-wide business objectives and areas where IT innovation can drive the business forward. Next, audit overall message management solutions in place to ensure they are both compliant with the requirements of your industry and able to respond quickly and efficiently to legal discovery requests. In addition, companies should evaluate the costs of building and maintaining a scalable archive infrastructure for long-term, multi-terabyte record retention and consider a hosted services provider to reduce cost and mitigate risk.

Also, consider hosted services such as Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services, that offer the broadest range of managed services that help organizations increase their performance, reliability, security and control of their existing messaging system while reducing costs.

By evaluating the business value of a full-serviced provider one can best determine what potential losses your company might suffer as a result of e-mail outages and security threats. This is critical to ensure that systems and processes in place are consistent with the current threat level and business value.

BMUS. Microsoft recently decided to move into the outsourced message management space – a market with a number of proven, already well-established competitors – through its acquisition of Frontbridge. What impact will this have for the industry as a whole?
JH. In the last several years, the need for secure, compliant, and always available e-mail has increased significantly for businesses. A leading provider of secure managed messaging services, Exchange Hosted Services reflects our commitment to respond quickly to customer needs and represents a key investment for the company as it continues to focus on improving the breadth and depth of our overall messaging solution.

Customers want a one-stop source for their communications archiving for compliance, content and policy enforcement, spam and virus elimination, disaster recovery, encryption and message continuity.

More and more customers today are looking for a single vendor who can deliver both on-premise and managed services to better secure and protect their messaging infrastructure.
Microsoft’s leading messaging solution, Exchange Server, will provide companies with a combination of in-house tools and hosted services for the IT administrator to reduce the cost and complexity of the messaging system, through anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-phishing enhancements.

For companies needing a leading provider of managed services that address corporate e-mail security, compliance and availability requirements, EHS provides a host of services that help organizations increase the reliability, security and control of their existing messaging system.

With one of the broadest portfolios of service offerings in the market, Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services and its partners can deliver a flexible, cost effective solution to provide customers with greater choice in how they secure their messaging infrastructure.