Postini Launches Managed E-Mail Security Service For SMBs

According to Postini's director of product marketing Andrew Lochart, the company has a number of smaller business customers using the enterprise product and used their experience as the basis for designing the new product. "The new service activates in minutes, requires no hardware, and the users never have to worry about updates or patches," said Lockhart, "and it pays for itself in days."

Postini sees the need for SMB email security solution as acute. "These small companies are receiving ten times more spam than the larger corporations, as we reported in our E-Mail Security Annual Review and Threat Report released in January," said Lochart, "and if you add to that the fact that the average small business has less than one person in IT, you can see a tremendous need for simpler email security solutions."

The Postini Perimeter Manager Small Business Edition includes Postini's traditional spam, phishing, and virus attack prevention technology, as well as protection against directory harvest attacks. However, the new product monitors only inbound e-mail, which means it cannot be used for compliance monitoring of outbound e-mail or internally addressed e-mail, nor can it prevent internally generated malware attacks. "It's a limitation," admitted Lochart.

The cost for the new service starts at $23 per user per year, and is reduced depending on the size of the installation. "It can get as low as $5 per user per year at 1,000 users." After that point users would move to the enterprise edition which, by contrast, starts out at $30 per user per year.

The Postini Perimeter Manager Small Business Edition is available immediately. For more information, visit www.postini.com/smb.