Email is everywhere. And it’s only when something as ubiquitous as email is stops working that we realize how much we rely on it. But email is more than just the messages you send and receive today. Are you looking far enough ahead to make sure your emails will be secure and accessible in the future?
Back in 2015, we received notification that our email security company – McAfee – had decided to exit the email security business. McAfee gave us about 18 months to find a replacement, but there was a lot of work to be done.
We had to:
- Vet other products
- Test them
- Validate security, education, convenience, features, pricing
- Identify what charges are relevant
- Migrate our domain to the new email security vendor
- Come up with a game plan on how we are going to explain the change to our clients
- Migrate more than 100 email domains
For us, it was an opportunity to look at how we managed this for our clients and how we could make improvements for the future. The good news is, we believe our clients’ email domains are now in a future-proofed place. Why do we believe that? Because we have the following protections:
- Email continuity: Even if the email server (Office 365 or other) goes down, my clients continue to send and receive emails – right from Outlook
- Email archiving: Whenever a client misplaces or deletes an email, we will always have a way to retrieve it
- Email security: We protect against spam messages from entering an inbox
- Email impersonation: We protect against people attempting to ‘spoof’ an email domain
- Email attachment scans: We scan all attachments to ensure there is no malicious code
- Email URL scan: We scan all URLs that are included in email messages to ensure there are no malicious sites being linked to
This may seem like a lot of protection – but spammers and other bad people are out there and they know email is an open platform for them to mess with you.
Here are some other ways to future-proof your email:
- If you are on the Office 365 platform, consider adding in a third-party tool to backup your mailbox. Microsoft Office 365 support will not recover your entire mailbox, or even individual emails if you accidentally lose them.
- If you are allowing your team to use their personal smartphones to connect to the business mailbox, consider adding in a third-party tool to be able to wipe the business mailbox should they leave the company or a phone get lost or stolen. Microsoft Office 365 support will allow you to wipe a phone, but it’s a complete wipe – back to factory defaults. The employee may lose whatever pictures, movies, and data were stored on the device. Be careful!!
As always, if you need help future proofing any part of your system, please reach out to me. My email address is [email protected].