– Magi Diego, product marketing manager at Trend Micro (www.trendmicro.com), says:

As email continues to be the predominant method of business communication, enterprises need to ensure email availability without end user productivity drain and network security risks associated with spam.

The delivery mechanism for cybercriminals continues to be primarily by email. Cybercriminals are no longer just using malicious email attachments; they are now getting users to click malicious URL’s in emails.

Email is the introduction point to the network. If you can proactively block spam/malicious email you can stop the url from ever being introduced into mailboxes and the subsequent click on the link which will prevent worm/malware from entering the network and keep the infection from ever happening.

We are seeing more targeted attacks against businesses and almost always the targeted attack will start with an email to one or two people inside the organization. If they click on the malicious link inside the email they could potentially infect the entire organization with a worm or download malicious code that steals data.

With so many security solutions to choose from, what’s a manager to do?
Look for a vendor that has a global presence and has more expertise than just email security. Look for a vendor who has been in the market for a long time and has a good reputation. A vendor with malware and threat expertise, not just a traditional spam filtering company is important. It’s important that your security vendor can do more than filter spam; they should be able look at embedded URLs and attachments and know which ones are malicious. The security vendor and solution should be able to be able to deal with email, web and file based threats and social networking threats.

A security company with global presence is important b/c they can provide 24/7 support, email doesn’t stop it’ll always be there and need to be dealt with. Also, make sure the vendor has the ability to support multiple infrastructures and fitting into IT infrastructure through virtualization. And also that the vendor offers a hosted service for inbound spam cleansing. Make sure vendor can also do outbound /DLP security.