The IronMail S Series from CipherTrust is a comprehensive email security appliance designed for small and medium-sized firms.
Best deployed within a demilitarized zone (DMZ) the S Series offers spam and fraud prevention, anti-virus protection, policy and content compliance, and secure email gateway capabilities.
Hardware-wise, the S Series comes as a 1U rack-mountable server built around an Intel Pentium 4 processor.
The sheer depth of functionality is well illustrated by the documentation, providing a comprehensive guide to the product and features.
The S Series anti-spam engine combines a number of different detection techniques to provide an overall aggregate score. It includes a 'user quarantine' feature, which means that staff can view blocked email themselves to ensure any legitimate email is not lost.
The hardened operating system of the S Series acts as an email firewall and intrusion detection system to block potentially devastating attacks such as buffer overflows, and denial-of-service attacks. It also uses real-time heuristics to keep a look out for any unknown attacks.
Another string to the IronMail bow is CipherTrust's Threat Response Updates, which allow newly discovered security techniques to be distributed to units out in the field. It provides comprehensive security cover when combined with the appliance's learning capabilities and sophisticated heuristic analysis.
Administration of the S Series is carried out through a standard web browser. Having temporarily re-assigned a client machine's IP address to match the default address range of the S Series, you can then access the configuration pages and begin a basic setup of the unit. It is a user-friendly process.
It is obvious that this product was initially designed for the enterprise, due to the sheer depth of functionality, but SMEs will also find they will use it more as time goes on.
