Postini Details New Innovations for Family of On-Demand Solutions
SAN CARLOS, Calif., April 2 /PRNewswire/ — Postini, a global leader in on-demand communications security and compliance solutions for email, instant messaging and the web, today detailed major new innovations and enhancements to its family of Software as a Service solutions. Postini also announced expanded geographic coverage. Postini’s solutions are designed to protect businesses worldwide from threats to their electronic communications, enforce business policies, secure intellectual property, assure privacy, and enable compliance with legal and industry requirements for the retention and discovery of email and IM data.
“Postini’s email security service just works,” said John Grofik, technical infrastructure supervisor at Four Seasons Solar Products in Holbrook, NY. “In addition, when we had some persistent network errors and bandwidth use issues at one of our six retail locations, we activated Postini Web Security and the problems went away immediately.”
“With the service enhancements that we are announcing today, Postini is improving on what were already highly effective and advanced on-demand solutions for communications security and compliance,” said Scott Petry, founder, chief technology officer and executive vice president of product development at Postini. “Postini’s new solutions raise the bar even further by delivering an expanded suite of tools that allow IT to define policies for security, encryption, supervision, retention and discovery across multiple protocols from a common services infrastructure. Postini’s services can deliver higher value, more quickly than traditional forms of on-premise software or hardware deployments.”
New innovations ensure multi-channel communications are secure and productive
Postini Email Security is designed to protect businesses from spam, viruses, phishing, fraud and other attacks to ensure the security, productivity and reliability of electronic mail.
Postini has enhanced its security offerings to protect clients from the increasing threats to their electronic communications. New innovations include:
* Adaptive heuristics — Postini has enhanced its adaptive heuristic framework with rapid filter updates and new algorithms that block emerging sophisticated zero hour spam, virus outbreaks, and image spam attacks. The result is an enhanced level of security and performance for Postini’s clients. * Improved PTIN intelligence — The Postini Threat Identification Network (PTIN) is a real-time collection of malicious and infected IP addresses that propagate spam, viruses, phishing, and other attacks across the internet. PTIN data is based on the collective data observed by Postini across the billions of connections processed daily across Postini’s global data centers. PTIN has been further enhanced to provide state of the art protection against distributed bot-net attacks. * Compressed file scanning — Malicious executables and other forms of viruses are often hidden inside of compressed or archived attachments in order to evade detection. Building on the recursive unpacking capabilities within the anti-virus scanning, new attachment scanning capabilities automatically open and inspect compressed and archived files, including multi-layered attachments to identify executable code by binary type, regardless of threat profile. This allows businesses to define polices to regulate inbound and outbound data flow throughout multiple layers of detection.
Combined with Postini’s security architecture, which is designed to ensure the most effective protection, these new innovations to Postini Email Security strengthen the value delivered to clients by maximizing catch rates of unwanted communications and minimizing false positives.
Postini Web Security provides HTTP real-time data scanning to protect businesses from viruses, spyware, adware and phishing attacks and web filtering to create, enforce, and monitor web usage policies. Postini Web Compliance dynamically enforces acceptable use policies regarding web usage, minimizing compliance violations and sensitive data loss.
“Postini gives me the peace of mind that users can’t create problems by clicking on web links and installing something they shouldn’t,” said Brian McPartland, IT manager of the Washington Capitals hockey organization. “Thanks to Postini, I can focus on other business issues. People wonder how I am able to run the IT department by myself for an organization of our size. Postini takes the pressure off of me and gives me time I can utilize elsewhere.”
New innovations and enhancements to Postini Web Security and Postini Web Compliance include:
* Pre scanned search results — New innovation provides an “early warning system” for search results from popular search engines including Google, Yahoo! and MSN. This keeps users from clicking on search results linking to sites that contain malware. This increases both security and productivity by delivering “visual cues” to users, alerting them of malicious sites and reducing infections and outages. * Network effect for URL scanning — Enhancements to web scanning ensure threat data is learned and shared across all users in order to improve security posture, improve operational integrity, and reduce load on IT staff. This new self-learning system continuously monitors web activity and adapts to threats in real-time. * Mobile and remote user support — With remote, mobile and home-based user bases growing, new enhancements to Postini’s web security solution enable customers to ensure access and usage policies are enforced regardless of the location from which users access the web and protect the corporate systems. * Intelligent web protection — New intelligent web protection filters out portions of web sites that contain malware or malicious links while providing access to the safe parts of the site. This provides much finer control than more blunt instruments that block entire sites or domains so business users can continue to access to sites they need while staying protected from web based threats. * Management reporting — New management reporting capabilities provide detailed visibility into employee usage of the web, blocked sites, and blocked content. The reports can be scheduled on a pre-defined schedule and accessed in multiple formats.
Postini Instant Messaging Security allows businesses to effectively utilize instant messaging while providing protection from threats and compliance with policies and regulations.
Identity based policy management — Postini enables clients to manage and track usage of multiple IM solutions. The expanded policy management framework enables clients to set up one policy for a user and apply this to multiple email and IM identities for that user. This functionality delivers the visibility and control companies need to manage how instant messaging is being used throughout their organization. New management reports are available on internal and external usage that assures instant messaging is used productively as a business communications tool.
Compliance integration — New integration with Postini Message Archiving allows instant messages to be captured, archived, searched and produced alongside email messages to ensure that retention of instant messaging is compliant with business needs for preservation of communications and ediscovery.
New compliance solutions simplify compliance and reduce e-discovery costs
Postini Message Archiving solutions offer businesses a centralized, on- demand access point for archival storage of email and instant messages, grant individuals self-service capabilities for message search and retrieval, and can expedite the discovery and recovery of information for HR, IT and legal inquiries.
“Our executives and legal counsel wanted to address compliance and litigation requirements proactively,” said Francis Chan, chief information officer, Clinical Laboratories of Hawaii. “The Postini solution was on-demand and the implementation was painless. Archiving messages was as easy as turning on the journaling feature on our mail server.”
Postini Message Archiving features: * Investigation management — New investigation management tools make it easier and more cost effective for businesses to manage the discovery process and share data with outside counsel or other requesting entities. This reduces the cost of discovering and producing communications in legal action as well as complying with regulations such as the recently amended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. * Email storage management with personal archive access — With Postini’s Message Archiving service, IT managers can reduce the email quota management burden by archiving messages centrally. Postini has added new personal archive functionality that gives business users a self-service, web-based solution with powerful capabilities to search for and recover email or instant messages that are stored in the Postini message archive. * Postini toolbar — The new Postini Toolbar provides native desktop integration with Microsoft Outlook and makes it easy for users to search for email and instant messages in their Personal Archive and to restore lost or deleted messages to their inbox. By allowing business users to search for and restore their own lost or accidentally deleted email or instant messages, IT managers can improve user productivity, while decreasing their support costs.
Postini Email Encryption delivers easy-to-deploy encryption capabilities for business to consumer communications that allow companies to comply with business policies for the prevention of intellectual property leakage and legal mandates to protect privacy.
* Email Message Encryption — Postini’s new “Inbox Delivery” message encryption solution allows businesses to send encrypted email directly to the recipient’s inbox. The message can then be easily decrypted, viewed and replied to directly without the traditional complexities of key management and PKI infrastructure. By allowing recipients to view and respond to encrypted messages, this solution enhances the user experience, encourages higher adoption rates, and lowers support costs.
New Postini platform capabilities improve usability, integration and reduce IT burden
Underpinning Postini’s suite of on-demand solutions for communications security and compliance is an integrated, patented, real-time technology platform that enables unified policy management and centralized administration, allowing customers to shift the burden of threat and compliance of their infrastructure to Postini’s global infrastructure. This platform offers the power of a multi-tenant architecture while meeting specific configuration requirements of each customer.
New platform capabilities include: * New Message Center — The new Postini Message Center is an easy to use, unified, web-based application that offers lower IT costs and can make business users more productive by allowing users to manage their personal preferences, view quarantined messages, and search for and restore lost or deleted email and instant messages. Administrators retain control over what levels and types of operations business users are allowed to perform in the message center. New Message Center is also available in five global languages; English, Spanish, German, Japanese, and French. * Web services support — Based on open Internet standards, Postini’s new web services are designed to provide automated and seamless connectivity between Postini’s systems and those of Postini clients and business partners. Web services encapsulate common business processes including single sign on, user and configuration management, user synchronization, policy change management usage reporting and more. Postini clients and partners can use the new web services to speed integration, accelerate their realization of value from the investment and decrease costs by automating administrative tasks and by creating value added solutions on top of Postini services. * Directory synchronization — New directory synchronization capabilities enable changes to user accounts, directory structures and access privileges to be automatically and continuously updated between Postini and Postini clients and partners. Supporting leading enterprise directories including those from Microsoft, IBM and Sun as well as open LDAP standards, Postini directory synchronization can reduce administrative costs and enable on-demand activation of new users.
Investments in global operations assure high performance and expanded reach
Postini’s global operations ensure security and compliance for clients’ mission critical business communications. Postini provides high availability, low latency and scalability.
* Best practice configurations — New Postini best practice service configurations are designed to deliver high productivity to system administrators coupled with dramatic reductions in infrastructure costs. The new configurations enable rapid deployment of Postini solutions with high quality of service and significant decrease in communications traffic, freeing up valuable server resources and bandwidth. * Operational improvements — Postini’s 14 globally distributed processing systems with architectural redundancy process 1.6 billion connections per day. These systems deliver the enterprise-class scalability, reliability and near real-time performance clients expect from Postini. Postini has improved its network monitoring operations with new functionality to monitor and manage system wide performance. This gives Postini clients added confidence that Postini solutions will continue to offer high reliability in the face of an ever increasing threat environment. * New data centers — New processing centers in Vancouver and Toronto increase global capacity and allow Postini to distribute infrastructure across a wider geographic footprint. The new Canadian processing centers accommodate the needs of Canadian businesses, driven by business policy and government compliance requirements, to keep their communications and processing local in Canada. Video webcast detailing the new and enhanced solutions
On Tuesday, April 3, at 8:00 am PDT, Postini will host a video webcast featuring Postini founder, chief technology officer and executive vice president of product development, Scott Petry, detailing Postini’s new and enhanced communications security and compliance solutions. To register for the video webcast go to http://www.postini.com/csc_launch
About Postini
Postini is a global leader in on-demand communications security, compliance, and productivity solutions for email, instant messaging and the web. Postini’s award-winning services are designed to protect customers from viruses, spam, phishing, fraud, and other attacks; encrypt messages to ensure confidentiality and privacy; and archive communications to ensure compliance with regulations and to prepare for e-discovery.
More than 36,000 businesses rely on Postini everyday to protect them from a wide range of threats, ensure reliable communications, reduce compliance and legal risks, and enable the intelligent management and enforcement of enterprise policies to protect intellectual property, reputations, and business relationships. More than 1700 business partners worldwide add value to Postini solutions. For more information please contact Postini at info@postini.com or visit http://www.postini.com/ .
Media Contacts: Marty Tacktill Derek Kober Postini GlobalFluency (650) 486-8269 (650) 328-5555 ext. 126 marty@postini.com dkober@globalfluency.com
Postini
CONTACT: Marty Tacktill of Postini, +1-650-486-8269, marty@postini.com;or Derek Kober of GlobalFluency, +1-650-328-5555, ext. 126,dkober@globalfluency.com, for Postini
Web site: http://www.postini.com/