McAfee End Of Life
Its hard to believe its happened, as Intel/McAfee has announced the end of life for what is essentially all their email security solutions. These include McAfee Email Gateway, Email Protection, Quarantine Manager, SaaS Email Archiving, SaaS Email Encryption, SaaS Email Protection, Email Protection and Continuity, and Endpoint and Email Protection. According to the announcement, Proofpoint is the recommended replacement for any of these products or services, but if you’re going to have to make a change, you should take a look at what is still out there and consider your options.
The Back Story
MX Logic was bought by McAfee in July 2009 for US $140 million dollars to add to their Security As A Service portfolio.Some people still call it the MX Logic email security service.
In 2010, Intel Corporation purchased McAfee for US $7.7 billion dollars, or what at the time was $48 a share. The deal closed in February of 2011, and in 2014, McAfee was re-branded as Intel Security, in case you never noticed and have been calling them McAfee for all these years or even MX Logic. Several months ago, Intel decided that the email security business was not profitable, and announced end of life for all the products listed above. Service Providers who are supporting the email security as a service option have not been allowed to add new customers since the start of this year and will end of life the service next year. However you need to check the official dates over on their page.
Considering how mission critical email is, and how popular an attack vector it remains for malware, phishing, and data leakage, the one thing that is clear is you cannot afford to have email without some kind of filtering and hygiene system.
What do you do?
One thing you can be sure of is that moving from one solution to another will not be seamless and
transparent to your users, no matter what the marketing material says. No two hygiene systems work in exactly the same way, and even if you export all your years’ worth of tuning and tweaking from your McAfee/MX Logic solution and reproduce them all in your new solution, there are going to be some bumps in the road. Different systems use different algorithms and heuristics to identify spam, different scanning engines to identify malware, and do different things with them. Prepare both your management and your users for the change. Some providers will give you a change manager to help with the migration.
There are plenty of other players on the market who handle email security. Look at what you had with McAfee or MX Logic, and ensure that you make a move to a similar set of services. Consider whether now is a time to add additional services, like archiving or business continuity, to your messaging system.
Keeping Email Safe
You want to filter out as much spam and viruses as possible, using heuristics, protocol analysis, reputation analysis, and key word evaluations. You will also need to be able to configure block and permit lists to support your business needs. And for suspected spam, you need to set up a central quarantine and task someone with its oversight. Many email security services will allow the users to receive quarantine digest reports. For malware, more is better, at least when it comes to scanning engines. Make sure your solution has multiple engines scanning for malware, and keep in mind that if you go with an on-premesis solution, you need to license all those scanners. Phishing attacks are the hardest to detect and deter, and can also be the most damaging, so make sure that whatever solution you choose, it’s got a great track history for detecting and blocking phishing attacks.There are many types of email filtering only available in “cloud” based solutions that utilize big data analysis to block new variants of unwanted traffic in real time.
Consider adding, additional features like email archiving, compliance, business continuity, and encryption capabilities. Email systems fail, and having a BCP/DR capability in place helps bring the most vital component of corporate communications up quickly.
DLP or Data Loss prevention is necessary in some companies to assist with compliance so take it into account if you need it.
Encryption comes in many forms and ensuring you have a usable encryption componant to your email system is vital.Make it easy for your users to comply.
Email is mission critical and the end of life of any service is always frought. If you are still on MX Logic or McAfee email security services, now is the time to investigate and choose a new service.
Include The Email Laundry in your investigations as it is the highest rated email security service on Spiceworks.
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