G Hunt - Page 18
by G Hunt | Jun 15, 2010 | SpamTitan News
Boston, Galway 15th June, 2010 : Failure by SMBs to adopt formal corporate social media policies, as highlighted by a survey by SpamTitan, could be storing up legal trouble for themselves in the not too distant future.
An audit of 200 SMBs worldwide revealed that while almost all allowed Internet access and some social networking applications in the workplace almost half (49 per cent) admitted they had not taken even basic steps towards a social media policy such as deploying a Web filter.
Many SMBs are now truly embracing social networking applications by adopted them within their overall marketing strategies. But it is almost impossible to track who owns this data as social data content is aggregated from site to site.
“As business embraces social networking as a way to propagate messages and build their brands the line dividing personal and company data is becoming increasingly blurred,” said Alastair Purdy, partner at Purdy FitzGerald Solicitors. “The important thing is to take steps to protect yourself or your company as much as possible in advance. Failure to do so will potentially leave the SMB sector with significant legal issues over data ownership.”
The legal position is at a very early stage of development. This is illustrated in a recent case involving the UK arm of a US business to business media publishing group (PennWell Publishing v Ornstein (2007 EWHC) ruled that the employer owned the outlook contacts of a former journalist employee even though this list contained both work and personal contacts some of which had been brought to the company by the employee.
This blurring between work and personal becomes even more problematic in the social networking sphere. In another recent UK case a recruitment consultant moved confidential contact information to his LinkedIn account whilst employed at Hays Recruitment. This decision was one of the first to highlight the tension between businesses encouraging employees to use social networking websites for work but then claiming that the contacts and content remain confidential information at the end of their employment.
“We are in a new era and it is time for every company to include a corporate social media policy alongside internet usage guidelines as part of their employment terms,” said Ronan Kavanagh CEO SpamTitan Technologies ‘Without a clear internet policy many employees are unaware of the implications of sharing information on sites like Linkedin and if appropriate protection is absent many employers risk being drawn into costly legal wrangles with employees as time goes on.”
“Companies need to get to a point where they are managing employee behaviour at the individual level,” continued Kavanagh. “Our WebTitan Internet filtering software for example is helping customers manage Internet usage in granular detail, thereby improving network security and reducing bandwidth demands in an easy-to-use, flexible and affordable way.”
WebTitan allows users to create and apply different policies to a limitless number of different workgroups. It is possible to create flexible policies and permissions for different individuals, groups or departments within an organisation. WebTitan has a dynamic database that is updated daily with new blacklisted sites. The categorization database along with the anti-malware protection automatically update in the background at periodic intervals set by the administrator. Featuring extensive and customizable keyword filtering and comprehensive reporting, WebTitan has minimal impact on resources so as to help companies meet the challenge of staying secure in the fast changing world of social networking as cost effectively as possible.
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About Purdy FitzGerald
Purdy FitzGerald Solicitors are a dedicated Business Law Firm offering specialist legal advice in the areas of employment law, corporate and commercial law, litigation and dispute resolution and private client.
About SpamTitan Technologies
SpamTitan Technologies, a global provider of sophisticated enterprise-level email security solutions, markets SpamTitan, offering small and medium size businesses the most comprehensive protection from email threats, including SPAM, viruses, Trojans, phishing, malware and other unwanted content. It also markets WebTitan, an easy-to-install, easy-to-manage and highly secure web filtering solution. SpamTitan Technologies’ unique approach in utilising next-generation virtualisation software eliminates the need for unwieldy hardware, giving customers unparalleled flexibility, versatility and capability but at an affordable price. A division of CopperFasten Technologies, SpamTitan Technologies is a global company with headquarters in Galway, Ireland. For further information visit www.spamtitan.com.
by G Hunt | Apr 6, 2010 | TitanHQ in the News, WebTitan News
Boston, MA and Galway, 6th April 2010 – WebTitan has been awarded the much coveted 5 star award by SC Magazine in the recent anti-malware gateway product test. The SC Magazine Awards program recognizes companies and products for outstanding achievement in information technology (IT) security.
Read the full review here at the SC Magazine Web site.
by G Hunt | Mar 12, 2010 | WebTitan News
Boston, MA and Galway, 12 March 2010 – SpamTitan technologies today unveiled the latest version of its widely acclaimed web filtering solution WebTitan 3.20. The new features and enhancements provide users with greater management capabilities allowing organisations to improve productivity while proactively protecting the organisations from today’s Web 2.0 threats, all at an affordable price.
All new features and changes contained in WebTitan 3.20 have resulted from feedback and suggestions from users. The most significant new feature in V3.20 is that WebTitan now supports transparent proxying and WCCP (Web Cache Control Protocol) allowing our end users to implement WebTitan in this architecture if that is the proxying method of choice in the organisation. This broadening of the WebTitan proxying support range means that WebTitan is now an Internet control and monitoring option for a greater number of organisations.
Additional inclusions to the latest version include improved console log-in features, improved dashboards statistics and improved customised reporting.
"We are dedicated to making web filtering easily accessible and manageable for all of our customers around the world," said Ronan Kavangh. "Our latest release raises the bar further in terms of performance and flexibility," said Kavanagh. "We continue to look for ways to ensure that WebTitan is continually improving the way organisations can protect their networks, improve productivity and successfully enforce a corporate internet usage policy in a cost effective way. These new features reinforce our goal of providing customers with the best webfiltering solution available."
Pricing & Availability
The product is available for free download from the WebTitan website. WebTitan ISO and WebTitan for VMware costs from $850, WebTitan licenses are banded offering greater flexibility and based on the number of IP addresses accessing the internet concurrently.
About WebTitan
WebTitan a division of Copperfasten Technologies, the global provider of sophisticated enterprise-level email security solutions, offers small and medium size businesses the most comprehensive protection from email threats, including SPAM, viruses, Trojans, phishing, malware and other unwanted content. WebTitans unique approach in utilizing next-generation virtualization software eliminates the need for unwieldy hardware, giving customers unparalleled flexibility, versatility and capability but at an affordable price. Integrating best of breed technologies, WebTitan provides an easy to install, easy to manage and highly secure webfiltering solution. WebTitan, a division of CopperFasten Technologies, is a global company with headquarters in Galway, Ireland.
by G Hunt | Feb 17, 2010 | TitanHQ News
Boston, MA and Galway, Ireland – 16th February 2010 – Virtualized security software appliances are playing a vital role in helping Internet Service Providers (ISPs) combat ever increasing levels of spam according to SpamTitan Technologies, the makers of powerful yet easy-to-manage spam and web filtering software. SpamTitan’s sales for the financial year ended 31 December 2009 showed a clear trend among ISPs for Cloud-, VMware- and ISO image-based anti-spam appliances.
Levels of spam account for 19 out of every 20 e-mails sent according to the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) in its third annual spam report just published. The report urges ISPs to make a more “dedicated effort” to get spam under control. ENISA says that a third of the largest service providers spend millions of Euros every year on anti-spam measures while one in four small ISPs has an annual spam-fighting budget in excess of €10,000 / $13700.
“As levels of spam accelerate ISPs are under pressure to apply increasingly costly resources to stopping malicious mail reaching customer inboxes,” says Ronan Kavanagh SpamTitan CEO. “But ISPs have to balance this against the need to manage costs and win new business. SpamTitan is proving increasingly popular with ISPs for its ability to help them derive increased efficiencies by moving to a virtualized, Cloud-based model and as well as for its accurate filtering and very low false positive rates.”
In 2009 the ISP sector accounted for 30 per cent of SpamTitan’s customer base and this is expected to rise to 45 per cent in 2010. SpamTitan’s ISP customer profile ranges from the small local providers to the very large industry providers supporting tens of thousands of users. ISP customers moving to SpamTitan recently include HBC Networks and PageOne Communications.
‘SpamTitan’s pricing actually came as quite a shock to us – it had more features than many of the other products we looked at, but cost substantially less,” explained Jim Brown, Network Analyst with HBC Networks. “Since we installed SpamTitan, it has blocked over 4.5 million junk emails that would otherwise have placed a serious drain on our customer’s mail servers.”
“For me, the real winner with SpamTitan is its unlimited user licensing model at a realistic price,” commented Gavin Lowle, Principal Information Technology Engineer, of PageOne. “Other advantages are its compatibility with VMware and how easy it is to deploy. We had SpamTitan up and running in minutes. It also has an extremely small footprint and uses minimal resource overhead. The multiple instance and clustering options in SpamTitan for VMware, in conjunction with VMware Vmotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and High Availability (HA), ensure our e-mail infrastructure remains highly resilient at all times.”
SpamTitan has been designed from the ground up to meet the complex scaleability and management needs of ISPs and other managed email service providers. .More and more this means operating in a virtualized environment as ISPs seek to optimize their server usage. “SpamTitan is one of the few virtualized security solutions to offer an extensive set of tools that are specifically tailored to the needs of ISPs,” said Kavanagh. “Features such as cluster management help increase total system capacity, provide enhanced monitoring and automatic failover capabilities. ISPs also have the ability to add domains directly into the SpamTitan API to automate the process of adding new clients to an ISP’s mail-filtering service. This flexibility along with the product’s reliability, capacity and tracking abilities is invaluable to dynamic environments such as ISPs where customers subscribe and unsubscribe on a continuous basis.
ISPs have to ensure customers do not experience delays when trying to use their server. This can happen if bandwidth is being swamped by useless and potentially harmful spam. SpamTitan takes care of all this for ISPs freeing them toconcentrate on other areas of the business. The January 2010 Virus Bulletin test cemented this fact voting SpamTitan No 1 in blocking the most spam ahead of many of the best known industry brands. According to Kavanagh, ”SpamTitan provides ISPs with all the bells and whistles at a fraction of the cost. We see a large number of our new ISP customers moving from existing big brand names. ISPs are under a great deal of budgetary and service level pressure and we are delighted that more and more are turning to SpamTitan as their best option.”
by G Hunt | Feb 9, 2010 | TitanHQ in the News
Boston, MA and Galway, Ireland – 9 February 2010: The latest issue of Messaging News, a premier publication focused on on the rapidly changing face of business email and messaging technology, features an insightful article by SpamTitan Technologies CEO, Ronan Kavanagh.
The article titled ‘the Death of the Hardware Security Appliance’ investigates the link between the rising popularity of virtualization for business applications of all kinds and the decline of the security hardware appliance. Kavanaghs’ article discusses how Virtualization technology has only recently come into its own developing from single server installations to fully global cloud-based infrastructures. Read more
