We’ve talked extensively before, here at Nutbourne, about the benefits that Office 365, by Microsoft, brings to businesses and corporations. It’s a great productivity and business suite for companies of virtually every size. How, though, do you go about ensuring your Office 365 applications are safe? It’s a complex question and one which has many potential answers. One of the ways, however, is to utilise Barracuda Essentials. We wanted to explain some of this offering’s security benefits in a bit more detail.
Email Threat Protection (Both Outbound & Inbound)
Inbound Protection
Barracuda Essentials’ inbound email protection features include the following:
- Identifying and blocking spam. Cybercriminals still primarily rely on user error/interaction as the vector through which they can infect and damage networks. Barracuda Essentials not only comes with several layers of spam protection, but comes with filters that seek out even the most hidden of spam – text embedded inside images, for instance – for the ultimate level of email protection.
- Link protection. The automatic rewriting of URLs that come in via email enables a sandboxing of any potentially malicious or harmful links that might enter a user’s email inbox.
- Heuristic (self-learning) phishing protection. Good cybersecurity these days involves software whose programming enables it to constantly improve and identify new threats, rather than simply being given a set and rigid list of threats to look out for. Barracuda Essentials offers such self-learning email protection, combined with both domain validation and anti-fraud intelligence built in.
- DoS (Denial of Service) protection. A DoS attack involves overwhelming a server with traffic so that it can no longer function; thanks to its cloud-based nature, however, this suite from Barracuda is well-armoured against such threats.
Outbound Protection
Its outbound email protection features include:
- Data leak protection. Filters prevent any spam bots sending out viruses whilst blocks/policies can be set up to ensure sensitive data isn’t sent out of the company via email.
- Encryption. You might work for a company whose job it is to handle sensitive information daily; or, like most businesses, you might only need to send highly sensitive emails occasionally. Regardless of frequency, you want to know as a business that whenever you send an important and confidential email, it’s secure. With Barracuda Essentials, you can either ensure all outbound emails are encrypted or set up encryption policies based on who’s sending the email, for example.
Backup & Recovery
If ever you’ve had no signal on your phone, you’ll have noticed that there’s still the option to make emergency calls; Barracuda Essentials offers something very similar from an email perspective. If, for whatever reason, there’s ever a server outage, then the emergency alternative enables emails to continue to be both sent and received.
With downtime as costly as it is to businesses – of any size – this guaranteed continuity, or failsafe, is a real bonus. The suite of services also offers renowned email cloud-to-cloud backup options, with both unlimited storage and retention.
Compliance Archiving
One of the features of Barracuda Essentials’ integration with Office 365 that’s particularly beneficial is its email archiving feature; this includes auditing and litigation holding features – so that emails can’t be altered or tampered with, ensuring clear ‘paper trails’ and greater transparency and accountability throughout a corporation.
The archiving feature also means emails are transitioned straight from Office 365 to a cloud-based archive, following compliance best practices as it does so. Having an archive separate to Office 365 enables more secure, granular retention policies so your company’s emails are safer and more secure than ever before.
Contact Us
Recent trends and reports have indicated that as much as 91% of cyberattacks start with a malicious email. The need, then, for a well-rounded and multi-layered email security suite has never been as important. Fortunately, that’s exactly what you get with Barracuda Essentials!
If you’d like to find out more about our work as a managed service provider in London, get in touch! Contact Nutbourne today on +44 (0) 203 237 7273 or by filling out one of our online contact forms. Alternatively, if you’d prefer, then you can send one of our team a message via ChatBot. We’ll aim to get back to you as quickly as we can, preferably within 48 hours. However you want to get in touch, we look forward to hearing from you!