What can SpamTitan anti spam do for Managed Service Providers? Interview with anti spam, email security, anti malware Steven Kenny, Head of Support Services, SpamTitan Technologies.
Can you start by telling us about SpamTitan?
Steven : SpamTitan began producing email security solutions over 15 years ago, and now provides powerful email and web security solutions to businesses worldwide. Security and networks have grown more complicated in the past 15 years, but SpamTitan has remained focused on delivering easy-to-use solutions that are comprehensive but not complex.Who do the experts turn to when they need a security solution? Seventy-three percent of SpamTitan’s customers are Managed Service Providers or system integrators. SpamTitans’ security solutions are used by network administrators and IT managers in 124 countries.
What Does the Email Threat Landscape Look Like Today for MSPs?
Steven : Email threats are increasing and getting more sophisticated, putting MSPs’ customers, their finances, and their identities at risk. MSPs may find their very survival as businesses under threat. Their antagonists, originally the hackers down the street, are now highly professional international crime gangs that are often based in Russia or China where law enforcement can’t get to them. Their attacks are getting increasingly sophisticated, with damage that might be evident immediately but sometimes isn’t apparent for years.
The most devastating attacks often start with a seemingly innocuous email. The recent Carbanak financial attack where a hacker group stole as much as $1 billion from banks and other financial companies worldwide since 2013 started with a simple phishing email. The target breach from last year was a massive assault that exposed the credit card and personal data of more than 110 million customers, appears to have started with a malware-laced email sent to employees at a firm that did business with Target. Anyone operating a data center—or anyone just connecting to the Internet–needs to make fighting spam and malware a top priority. Everyone who goes online must have the tools to fight phishing and social engineering.
Let’s talk about email. How do you convey the importance of email protection in today’s culture?
Steven : Email is still an important business tool. It’s also the favourite method of entry for attackers. No news there. As a gateway to sensitive customer information, crucial databases, and other valuable data, email remains one of the most effective threat vectors around.
Email is older than the web, which may mean that it’s lost some of its lustre. Many see social media platforms as more exciting, and the fact that email is non-proprietary means no one is pushing its agenda. But email is actually growing in influence; as the number of internet users grow, so does email usage. Every social media account requires an email address, and most people have more than one.
Email security solutions need to continue to evolve to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated attacks that threaten all of us. At SpamTitan, we do our best to educate the IT community and potential customers on the consequences of doing nothing. Putting the right protection in place is key. Prevention is cheaper and easier than dealing with the damage and financial loss resulting from a successful hacking attack.
What should MSPs be doing today to protect themselves from email threats?
Steven: MSPs often provide email security as a service. One customer getting hacked can result in the IP address for many customers getting hacked – a single bot on the network can bring down the service for multiple customers. Preventing IP blacklisting in the first place is critical; MSPs need to ensure the anti-spam solution they deploy has features such as IP rotation, bandwidth throttling, and rate controls, allowing limits to be set for emails sent per unit time, size, domain and per mailbox. If a potential blacklisting event is detected, the solution also needs to alert the network administrators so action can be taken. MSP IP addresses can be very well protected by using specific features within SpamTitan like Rate Controls and IP Delivery Pool features.
MSPs see their margins squeezed by commoditisation of services by technology giants. They need more cost effective infrastructure and technology at the same time as they’re being pressured to continuously improve customer service. MSP margins, which directly affect profits, are being squeezed by the economy, competition, and the need to keep up with technology. MSPs customer vary and some like more control of the service provided than others. With SpamTitan MSPs can delegate administration of domain groups and/or domains to their customers, this provides some control to the customer and also frees up the MSPs time to deal with other issues.
Attackers still rely on email as a method for deploying malware, whether via advanced phishing attacks, drive by downloads – the list of threat delivery methods is increasing all the time. There is no single cure for these persistent and increasing threats. Powerful email security (inbound and outbound filtering) provides a barrier for attackers to overcome. SpamTitan includes the latest version of the Kaspersky anti-virus software which offers zero-day threat detection via Cloud based signatures. MSPs need to deliver consistent protection. A heavily layered security solution like SpamTitan successfully delivers this integrated approach.
What kind of MSPs use SpamTitan?
Steven : MSPs looking to offer their customers world-class email security without the requirement of sophisticated infrastructure, expensive expertise, or massive time investment for what should ideally be an invisible service. Because spam filtering is considered to be an integral part of an email service MSPs, customers aren’t willing to pay extra for it.
The MSP customers who use SpamTitan are knowledgeable and know what they want in a solution. Many are moving from cumbersome and overly complex products. They know what they need to find in an alternative that really works for them.
What’s the most common feedback you get from MSP customers?
Steven : How easy SpamTitan is to set up and the fact that once deployed there are no reports of customers being hit by spam or email viruses. It’s not surprising that our solution is so successful; it uses multiple layers of testing and filtering and comes with double anti-virus protection.
Our MSP appreciate the fact that SpamTitan is easy to use, easy to manage, and extremely affordable compared to other solutions they’ve tested. A major reason why MSPs invite SpamTitan into their product portfolio is the attractive pricing. With MSP margins shrinking MSPs are very careful about planning their technology to give them the edge in the market and to provide reasonable returns, and they find they can depend on SpamTitan to deliver.
If you would like to find out more about SpamTitan and how it can help you offer a more secure and profitable service we would be delighted to hear form you. You can email us at info@spamtitan.com or call +1 813 304 2544 (US) or +353 91 545555 (IRL).