Permessa Expands Protection of Corporate Email with New Version of Email CONTROL! Enforcer

New Features Enhance Credit Card Detection and "Ethical" Email Firewall Support

August 14, 2007; 01:53 AM

Permessa Corporation (formerly DYS Analytics), whose solutions manage today’s top enterprise messaging platforms, announced the immediate availability of a new version of its Email CONTROL! Enforcer™ software for messaging content control. The product’s new features for proactively monitoring and controlling enterprise messaging allows IT staffs to better automate the enforcement of corporate messaging policies. Enhancements also make it easier for IT staffs to reduce employee misuse, create “ethical” email firewalls as required by some industries, and avoid confidentiality breaches that could lead to the accidental dissemination of credit card or national identifier numbers.

Emails with inappropriate content and/or for excessive personal use are a potential business liability in today’s environment of regulatory compliance and eDiscovery rules. Seemingly innocuous frequent mass mailings and large messages can also consume significant resources, leading to high operational costs.

Email CONTROL! Enforcer continuously monitors messaging traffic for email policy compliance purposes. It monitors email based on predefined business processing rules that are ranked from low to high by the level of the violation. Email CONTROL! Enforcer applies each of these rules to outbound and inbound messages and checks for content violations, based on the level of the violation a different warning may be sent. For example, “passive mode” can be used when the deployment is initially launched as a means of getting employees accustomed to the new system and as a way for IT to define the rules that best suits the organization. When users send emails containing content that violates any of the predefined policies, they receive a passive “warning” letting them know what rule has been violated and their message continues to be delivered to the recipient. Subsequently, users become familiar with the email policy and new user behavior(s) are learned. Alternatively, when the system is set to “enforcement mode”, the rules are enforced, and thus the sender receives either a “warning” for minor violations, or the message can be “quarantined” requiring action on the part of the sender, and in cases of severe violations the message is simply “rejected.”

In industries where communication between two parties is restricted by law, for example between traders and brokers in the financial sector, an “ethical” email firewall policy can be established to stop communication between user names, mail groups, and domain names. If any email is sent between such groups the software has the flexibility to either quarantine or outright reject the message and the appropriate IT manager can be notified.

Email CONTROL! Enforcer automates the enforcement of enterprise messaging, and significantly reduces IT staff from acting as corporate “email police”, freeing them for more revenue-impact projects. The software also helps IT staffs to maintain an efficient and responsive email infrastructure by reducing server, network and disk consumption.

“The tremendous risks of unmonitored messaging are no longer unique to the financial services industry or other sectors with mandatory regulatory requirements,” said Stefan Mehlhorn, CEO of Permessa. “This enhanced version of Email CONTROL! Enforcer for IBM Lotus Domino gives IT even more proactive email control within and beyond a corporate network. It helps IT folks responsible for corporate messaging at any type of organization more readily demonstrate and enforce compliance to internal email policy and protects the corporate communication infrastructure.”

What’s New in Email CONTROL!:

• Enhanced Detection of Credit Card and National Identifier Numbers – enhancements refine the product’s ability to prevent the unintentional dissemination of financial card information via electronic mail. The software checks message body and subject content for credit, debit or charge card account numbers, which contain a fixed number of digits and a common recommended format. Similarly, the body and subject of applicable messages are searched for national identifiers, such as the US Social Security number, to identity matches for the specified identifier type based on its well known format. Unlike other solutions addressing this problem, Email CONTROL! Enforcer uses proximity matching to significantly reduce the potential for false positives.
• New “Ethical” Email Firewalls Support– added features allow IT staffs to swiftly and flexibly deploy an “ethical” email firewall in which two groups of email users are limited to, or prohibited from, communicating via corporate email. Such approaches are used at large financial institutions where the firm must demonstrate it has taken steps to prohibit financial traders and futures analysts from interacting.
• New Message Stream Sampling – so compliance staff can more quickly gather information that will be helpful in setting appropriate rule parameters. Large enterprises often process too many email messages per second for real-time reporting. Enhancements in the latest version of Email CONTROL! Enforcer gathers summary information about the message stream based on a random sampling or message envelope criteria.
• Improved Workflow Reporting - to help the administrator understand email usage trends at a glance, and ensure Email CONTROL! Enforcer assists both user and IT alike. Expanded reports on how quickly users release or discard their quarantined messages can help the IT administrator to better tailor feedback notification messages or refine policies.

About Permessa

Permessa Corporation (formerly DYS Analytics, Inc.) provides enterprise-class products and services that manage today's top messaging platforms. Allowing corporate IT to take control of their IBM Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, Lotus Sametime, Lotus QuickPlace, and Lotus Quickr networks, Permessa makes Unified Communications work - automating the entire cycle of analysis, optimization, and control. Our solutions mitigate risk, increase performance and lower the costs associated with mission-critical messaging solutions. Permessa’s customers are large and small, global and local, including such firms as JPMorgan Chase, HSBC, Bank One, ABN AMRO Bank, Zurich Financial Services, IBM, CSC, Henkel, Novartis, Hewitt, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Schering, and Merck Serono, GlaxoSmithKline. For information about our products and services, visit www.permessa.com or send an email to [email protected].