November 2, 2005

Teneros Announces Application Continuity Appliance for Microsoft Exchange

"When it comes to keeping Microsoft Exchange up and running, there are thousands of mid-sized companies that need enterprise-quality IT support but just don't have the enterprise-level IT budget or staff," says David Ferris, president and senior analyst at Ferris Research. Teneros has come up with a smart, affordable option for that market in a self-contained appliance."

Teneros this week announced the release and general availability of the Teneros Application Continuity Appliance (ACA) for Microsoft Exchange, stated to be the first appliance on the market to deliver instant-on failover within seconds of a planned or unplanned downtime event for a Microsoft Exchange server.

"In today's global marketplace, mid-market companies and field offices of large enterprises who rely on Exchange simply can't afford email outages, regardless of whether the outage is due to Exchange failure or periodic planned maintenance," said Steve Lewis, Teneros founder and chief executive officer. "Planned maintenance during local "off hours" is not viable with employees and customers in different geographic locations and time zones- midnight on Sunday in the corporate time zone may be the middle of the working day where customers are located. So we built a simple, affordable appliance that provides 24/7 continuity for Exchange, eliminating end-user email downtime."

Teneros reports that with a simple 15-minute installation using the Web-based interface, the Teneros ACA requires no configuration changes to the Exchange server and ensures continuous, 24/7 Exchange operation for end users. It installs no intrusive software agents on the Exchange server and can be deployed equally effectively at headquarters or at branch offices to guarantee 99.99%-99.999% (four nines to five nines) uptime for Microsoft Exchange. Teneros distributes the appliance via its channel partners and has signed distribution agreements with system integrators nationwide.

"Teneros is addressing a significant market requirement with a simple, elegant solution," says Ferris.

By providing continuous, end-user Exchange email services whenever the production Exchange server experiences downtime, businesses eliminate this source of revenue and productivity loss. Because the Teneros solution is a plug-&-go appliance, the company says it adds no in-house IT tasks or ongoing costs because of the remote management, update, and monitoring service is provided by Teneros' network operations center.

The Teneros ACA protects against Exchange data corruption via the company's proprietary Transaction Integrity Validation technology. This technology prevents Exchange data corruption replication from the Exchange server to the Teneros ACA, resulting in protection of data on the Teneros appliance.

Teneros announced separately, on the same day, that they earned Gold Partner accreditation in the Advanced Infrastructure Solutions category from Microsoft. Gold Certified Partners are the top level Microsoft solutions partners who earn the highest customer endorsement and gain early access to advanced resources to increase the company's Microsoft expertise.

Look to the December issue of Messaging News for more information about Teneros plus other Microsoft Exchange solutions.

Threat of Zombies Continues

Spammers hijack computers to flood in-boxes with spam. These "zombie" computers are controlled by "botnets." A botnet is a group of computers that have been compromised by a third party. In some instances a botnet might be rented to a spammer to hype a product or service, or to execute a phishing attack. There are several networks of commercially available botnets.

There appears to be a developing value chain for the parties who run the botnets, which control the zombies. These parties have an interest in infecting more and more computers so they have more resources from which to send spam on behalf of spam marketers.

Spam comes from zombies. Zombies come from viruses. There are many ways to become infected and eventually have your computer resources "owned" by someone else.

"The average duration of a spam attack has dropped to around 45 minutes before a spammer switches IP addresses or domains. So frequently, attack signatures are only valid for some 24 hours. All indicators point to spammers using wide-scale botnets, participating in more frequent attacks, with ever changing signatures, says Daniel Freeman, Senior Product Manager at Symantec.

While using a messaging appliance will keep users from infecting themselves by clicking on attachments carrying viruses, this will prevent only one vector. Appliances will not prevent users from clicking on malicious websites, and ultimately infecting themselves and becoming part of a botnet. Most messaging appliances also prevents outbound spam from your network. Which means if your users surf some malicious website and become a zombie, you can keep your network from being used as a spam source.

In The News:

Fortiva Adds Features to Email Archiving Suite

Fortiva Inc., a provider of managed email archiving services, announced yesterday the addition of several new features to the Fortiva Suite. These product enhancements - which include improved integration with Active Directory and Outlook, importing of PST files, and the ability to establish internal controls for email- are designed to help businesses reduce their exposure to risk while saving time and improving productivity.

In addition to helping meet regulations that focus on internal controls such as Sarbanes-Oxley and Basel II, Fortiva's new features can improve business efficiencies and provide insight into everyday business activities. By setting up supervision workflow processes within Fortiva, email that meets specific criteria can be automatically identified and flagged for review by a subject matter expert, rather than a general compliance reviewer. As a result, businesses can track adherence with department-specific processes or policies. For example, if the head of sales is required to approve all customer discounts, Fortiva can flag any email from the sales team with the word 'discount' for review by that individual.

The Fortiva Suite is available now.

We welcome your ideas and your news for Messaging Newswire's News & Trends in Email Security. Let us know what you think by sending your comments to editorial@messagingnews.com. Written and compiled by Stephanie Jordan

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