Microsoft is ready to launch a revamped hosted security service, an online email security option for protection of inbound and outbound e-mail from spam, viruses, phishing scams, and e-mail policy violations.
Forefront Online Security for Exchange is the first of a series of cloud offerings expected from Microsoft and will be used to deliver four security service components.
These will cover content and policy-based filtering, spam and virus scanning, real-time message trace and reporting, and disaster recovery.
The service starts at $1.75 per user per month, according to a Microsoft website.
The system allows administrators to enforce policies on e-mail usage and gives them tools that allow the status of any e-mail processed by Forefront Online Security for Exchange to be retrieved in real-time.
If the destination e-mail server becomes unavailable for any reason, no e-mail is lost or bounced because it will be automatically sent every 20 minutes until successful and queued for up to five days. Microsoft says it will use a network of data centres of fault-tolerant servers to route traffic and minimise the chances of interruption to the service.
Access to the service is triggered with a mail exchange record configuration change, and there is no hardware to provision and no software to buy or install. The system integrates in any existing Active Directory system.
