Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering

On This Page Introduction How it Works Solution Overview Benefits Service Level Agreements (Terms and Conditions Apply) Next Steps

Introduction

Exchange Hosted Filtering incorporates multiple filters to actively help protect businesses’ inbound and outbound e-mail from spam, viruses, phishing scams, and e-mail policy violations.

Electronic messaging is mission-critical, but with viruses, worms, denial-of-service attacks, spam, the need to satisfy a growing set of government regulations, and legal actions that call for e-mail as evidence, effective message security and management is increasingly difficult.

The service employs multilayered defenses to help block e-mail malware from reaching your corporate gateway. In addition, the service provides both rich tools for writing rules to help enforce corporate and regulatory policies governing e-mail usage and disaster recovery tools to queue mail for delivery in the event of an e-mail server outage. Exchange Hosted Filtering is deployed over the Internet, which helps minimize up-front capital investment, free up IT resources to focus on value-producing initiatives, and mitigate messaging risks before they reach the corporate network. Exchange Hosted Filtering provides a comprehensive set of SLAs backing network performance and spam/virus filtering effectiveness.

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How it Works

With just a simple MX record configuration change, Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering can be up and running quickly. There is no hardware to provision; no software to buy, install or configure; and no expensive training required for your IT staff.

Furthermore, there is no need for you to change or modify your existing e-mail infrastructure or even to install and maintain any new hardware or software. The heart of Exchange Hosted Filtering is a distributed network of data centers located at key sites along the Internet backbone. Each data center contains fault-tolerant servers that are load-balanced from site to site and from server to server. In the unlikely event that one data center is unavailable, traffic can be easily routed to another data center, minimizing the chances of any interruption to the service. Microsoft algorithms analyze and route message traffic between data centers to help ensure secure and timely delivery.

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Solution Overview

Virus Protection Features
Exchange Hosted Filtering helps protect organizations from known viruses and helps provide zero-day threat protection against virus outbreaks. At the core of the service’s virus-fighting strategy are multiple, antivirus engines that are integrated at the application programming interface level to continually provide critical virus definition updates. Exchange Hosted Filtering uses at least three different antivirus engines at all times with the ability to immediately engage additional engines when acute threats warrant additional coverage.

Spam Protection Features
Powered by multiple filtering engines and an around-the-clock team of anti-spam experts, Exchange Hosted Filtering virtually eliminates spam from inboxes, helping provide bandwidth for legitimate corporate use, free precious server and storage resources, and decrease the risk of loss of sensitive information or identity theft.

Captured spam is routed to the spam quarantine folder and can be accessed by administrators or end users at any time through an intuitive Web-based interface. An e-mail notification that lists newly quarantined spam can be configured to send to each valid e-mail address. This simplifies the end user experience by making review of spam simple and effective. Exchange Hosted Filtering offers the spam quarantine Web-based interface and HTML notifications in several languages.

Policy Enforcement
Exchange Hosted Filtering helps administrators enforce policies they set up to comply with corporate policies on e-mail usage and with government regulations, such as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Rule 17a, the National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) rules 3010 and 3110, and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). The intuitive policy rule writer makes it easy to monitor and manage e-mail messages based on virtually any message attribute, such as originating IP, sender, recipient, message size, file attachment, or specific text in the subject or body.

Disaster Recovery
If a customer’s e-mail server or Internet connection becomes unavailable for any reason, Exchange Hosted Filtering helps to ensure that no e-mail is lost or bounced. Microsoft queues inbound e-mail in a security-enhanced environment for up to five days. After the customer’s e-mail servers recover, all queued e-mail is automatically forwarded in a flow-controlled fashion. In cases of extended downtime, e-mail can be rerouted to another server or made available through a Web-based interface.

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Benefits

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Service Level Agreements (Terms and Conditions Apply)

Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering provides comprehensive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) backing network performance and spam and virus filtering effectiveness. The SLAs include:

Filtering Network Infrastructure

Filtering Accuracy

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Next Steps

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