If you’re not logging into the interface very often, it’s almost as if you’ve got to learn the interface from scratch. Websense/Black Spider, Postini and FOPE) are very capable in terms of what they can do, but for your average IT administrator settings are found all over the place. I’ve worked with a number of cloud-based mail scanning solutions in the past – working on projects to migrate to them from on-premises systems, moving between different solutions and during Exchange Server migrations had experience when cutting mail over between the old and new systems.Ī common theme with some of these solutions is that the user interface isn’t very intuitive and all of these products (e.g.
GFI got in touch with me about a month ago and asked me to give their new product, GFI MailEssentials Online a spin and share my thoughts… First Impressions
With that in mind, it’s interesting to see that GFI, who have long been a leader in the market for on-premises spam and malware scanning software with GFI MailEssentials, move to offer a cloud-based solution to compete, primarily in the SMB market. Working as a TA these days I see the same decisions made elsewhere and these days it really is the exception rather than the rule when I see a customer who is running on-premises mail scanning software at the edge. So around that time, I decided it just wasn’t worth it and outsourced mail scanning to the cloud – and never looked back. By 2010 the kind of effort required to keep up with the above was something I particularly found resource intensive, even though much of it I was delegating to my team. During that time I had to understand a lot about where spam and associated malware comes from and what techniques work well against it. Between 20 I spent a lot of time working with on-premise solutions which processed hundreds of thousands of clean mail each day and deflected many orders more spam. Because of the load it can put on systems and your networks, the larger the company the less value in running it yourself.įirst of all, let me give you a bit of background. In today’s modern world of spam and malware filtering, I’m of the opinion it’s not always worthwhile running spam filtering software on-premise.