New spam firewall technology for small enterprises enters Kenya

By MARK KAPCHANGA

With growing infrastructure in the country, businesses are constantly looking for solutions that protect their networks and users from Internet threats.

So dire is the problem that enterprises in Kenya are said to be losing millions of shillings annually, a development that has put their balance sheets in shaky positions.

In some cases, hackers have exploited what are delivered in corporate mails to get access to firms’ networks, exposing valuable business details to third parties.

The sophisticated technology has not helped businesses, as hackers re-invent smarter moves aimed at accessing confidential business information.

According to Radicati Group, a market research firm in California, there are more than 50 billion spam messages each day, costing companies almost $200 billion (Sh20 trillion) per year.

But the problem is likely to be put into a stop with the latest entry of a multinational spam protection firm, the Barracuda Networks, into the country.

The firm, which offers "unmatched" cushion to any attacks on businesses, entered the country recently through its local partner, the BST Kenya Limited. Barracuda targets small and medium term enterprises, whose networks have been under constant attacks.

"The Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall is an integrated hardware and software solution designed to protect your email server from spam, virus, spoofing, phishing and spyware attacks," said Mr Julius Ngigi, the firm’s engineer, adding: "It leverages 12 comprehensive defense layers to provide industry-leading defense capabilities for any email server within large corporate or small business environments."

According to Ngigi, electronic mail has become a key tool for communications among companies worldwide, prompting unscrupulous tech gurus to exploit it at their own benefits.

"With frequent virus attacks and the alarming rate that spam has been filling up inboxes, this channel is quickly becoming a less efficient means of communicating," he said.

Designed by a team of veteran networking engineers, the Barracuda Spam Firewall is a powerful, enterprise-class solution, supporting 30,000 active email users and handling 20 million messages each day.

Its architecture leverages open source virus and spam solutions, in conjunction with ten defense layers.

"This architecture optimises the processing of each email, which yields the performance required to process millions of messages per day. Unlike software solutions, the Firewall reduces the load placed on the email server by off-loading both spam and virus filtering," said Mr James Muturi, the Barracuda sales manager.

With no software to install and no modifications required to existing email systems, technology experts say the installation is thus user friendly, typically taking around five minutes.

Once installed, the system administrator uses an intuitive web interface for monitoring and maintenance.

BLACKLISTED DOMAINS

"The spam firewall requires minimal maintenance because its innovative design incorporates reliability into every aspect of the product. Energise updates are automatically retrieved, enabling maximum spam and virus protection while eliminating administrative overhead," said Muturi.

The sales manager argues that with no trojan and virus infections, it means a firm’s domain will not send spam messages itself and outbound spam filtering means the mails with your domains will not be blacklisted.

He says while many people have concentrated on inbound spam for many years, outbound spam is turning out to be a bigger nuisance.

"Significantly higher costs of providing service outbound spam drives up the cost of providing services to customers in several ways, including an unnecessarily large number of calls to technical support staff to address false positives, switching customers to new IP addresses and additional IT staff time to identify and resolve outbound spam issues."

More critical, he says, is that spam attacks lead to the damage of corporate reputation. "Being known as a provider that blocks an unacceptably high proportion of legitimate outbound email is simply not good for business. Ultimately, it can put a provider out of business," he says.

In addition to the extended anti-virus capabilities, the Barracuda Spam and Virus Firewall now allows administrators to customise the notifications sent to recipients of encrypted emails.

Notification emails can be customised in any language, and the Barracuda Message Centre—where recipients log-in and read encrypted emails sent to them— can be branded with the sending organisation’s logo. This provides an additional layer of credibility for senders and confidence for recipients that the emails are legitimate.