Is your organization moving to cloud-based email and productivity apps? Whether you’re taking the plunge on Office 365, Gmail or other services, it pays to pause and first evaluate the security that your new provider is offering. What do they offer? Where do you need additional security? And amidst all the features and claims made by each vendor, how can you really tell which one offers the most robust and reliable email security?
Our suggestion: Check the vendor’s service level agreements (SLAs). The more robust they make their SLAs, the more capable and confident they are in their services. A company that won’t commit to service guarantees likely can’t deliver those service guarantees. In the email security space, that typically translates into five specific areas of need:
Malware Protection
Spam Capture
Email Availability
Email Delivery
Email Latency
The Symantec Commitment
At Symantec, we’re serious about providing the most dependable email security service, so we put money behind our commitment. Our SLAs are the most robust in the business, and we publish our performance against those service level targets every month. Most importantly, we pay you if we don’t meet these targets since our SLAs are punitive.
Specifically, this is how we measure up against the five service guarantee areas:
1. Malware Protection
In our view, even one infection is too many. We’re the only service that will provide 100% service credit for threat efficacy after just one infection during the calendar month. Our competitors never pay out more than 50% – even after multiple infections.
Why Is This Important?
Email continues be the #1 threat vector for companies, and these attacks are getting more sophisticated. For instance, our latest Internet Security Threat Report identified a 55% increase in spear phishing and a 13X increase in business email compromise, resulting in billions of dollars in losses to organizations. Email has also become the most prevalent channel for ransomware to infiltrate companies.
2. Spam Capture
Symantec guarantees greater than 99% spam efficacy capture for English-language emails, and 95% for non-English emails. We’re the only email security provider to guarantee spam capture in English and other languages.
Why Is This Important?
Typically, nearly half of the email messages that users receive are spam. If you don’t have robust filtering in place, your email will quickly fill with spam and become unmanageable for your users. Moreover, not all spam is in English, and many email security systems don’t filter (or won’t commit to filtering) spam in other languages. You could easily find your email system overwhelmed by non-English spam unless you have this protection.
3. Email Availability
If service availability falls below 100%, Symantec provides a credit for that month. Based on SLAs, other vendors believe 95% availability is good enough. We don’t. We even provide you a full cancellation clause if our availability falls below 95%.
Why Is This Important?
In today’s 24 x 7 business environment, you need email security to be operating all the time, filtering and delivering messages as soon as people send them. Are you comfortable with 1% or 2% downtime? If your provider only guarantees 95% uptime, are you OK with email security being down for 18 days per year? How does this impact trust in your business if you or your customers are not able to communicate due to downtie?
4. Email Delivery
Symantec is the only service that guarantees 100% delivery of all email sent to or from customers, assuming the email was received by Symantec and did not contain a virus, spam or other filtered content. And if we don’t meet 100% delivery, you can cancel your contract.
Why Is This Important?
Not getting email is almost as bad as getting malware. Can you be confident that all your outgoing and incoming email are being delivered? If it’s not 100%, which emails aren’t going through? And how is this impacting customer relationships and business opportunities? Your business depends on communication, and reliable email delivery is foundational.
5. Email Latency
We deliver customer email almost three times faster than our competitors. In fact, if email averages more than a one minute round trip, we’ll give you a partial service credit – and a full service credit if email latency exceeds an average of a three minute round trip.
Why Is This Important?
Businesses today use email as a universal form of communication, including both “read it whenever” updates and “take immediate action” notices. If your security service takes too long to scan and filter emails, your employees and customers will be left waiting. This can be a big problem when they are expecting time-sensitive information.
Bottom line: We lead the market in cloud-based email security for Office 365, Google Apps and more – fueled by the world’s largest civilian threat intelligence network, as well as advanced machine learning, advanced heuristics, comprehensive link following (both real-time and click-time) and advanced threat protection. We protect 163 million email users and scan more than 2 billion emails every day. And we’re willing to stand behind it all with the most aggressive SLAs in the industry.
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