MICROSOFT FOREFRONT ONLINE SECURITY
FOR EXCHANGE

HOW IT WORKS

Microsoft Forefront Online Security for Exchange (FOSE) consists of layered technologies to actively help protect businesses’ inbound and outbound e-mail from spam, viruses, phishing scams, and e-mail policy violations.

With just a simple mail exchange (MX) record change, email will be routed to FOSE. No hardware or software must be purchased and installed; and no expensive training is required for your IT staff. Administrators can configure and tune FOSE to meet their filtering needs.

Microsoft Forefront Online Security for Exchange operates on the Exchange Hosted Services network, which is a distributed network of datacentres located at key sites around the world. Each datacentre contains fault-tolerant servers that are load-balanced from site to site and from server to server. In the unlikely event that a datacentre is unavailable, traffic is easily routed to another datacentre, minimizing the chances of any interruption to the service. Sophisticated algorithms analyze and route message traffic between datacentres to help ensure secure and timely delivery.

VIRUS PROTECTION

Microsoft Forefront Online Security for Exchange helps protect organizations from all known viruses and helps provide zero-day threat protection against virus outbreaks. At the core of the service's virus-fighting strategy are multiple antivirus engines, integrated at the application programming interface level to continually provide critical virus definition updates. FOSE uses at least three different antivirus engines at all times with the ability to immediately engage additional engines when acute threats warrant additional coverage.

SPAM PROTECTION

Powered by multiple filtering engines and an around-the-clock team of anti-spam experts, FOSE virtually eliminates spam from inboxes, helping to provide bandwidth for legitimate corporate use, free precious server and storage resources, and decrease the risk of loss of sensitive information or identity theft. Captured spam is routed to the spam quarantine and can be accessed by administrators or end users at any time through an intuitive Web-based interface. An email notification that lists newly quarantined spam can be configured to send to each valid email address. This simplifies the end-user experience by making it simple and effective to review spam. FOSE offers the spam quarantine Web-based interface and HTML notifications in several languages.

POLICY ENFORCEMENT

FOSE helps administrators enforce policies they set up to comply with corporate policies and local legistlation on email usage. The intuitive policy rule writer makes it easy to monitor and manage email messages based on virtually any message attribute, such as originating IP, sender, recipient, message size, file attachment, or specific text in the subject or body. Wild cards and regular expressions are supported.

DISASTER RECOVERY

If the destination email server becomes unavailable for any reason, FOSE helps to ensure no email is lost or bounced. FOSE automatically queues email for up to five days, attempting to deliver the email every 20 minutes. After the customer's e-mail servers recover, all queued email is automatically delivered in a flow-controlled fashion.

REAL TIME MESSAGE TRACING AND REPORTING

Administrators can use the powerful Message Trace tool retrieve the status of an email processed by FOSE in real-time. With basic information, such as the sender, recipient, and date, administrators can retrieve information on email processed within the last 30 days. If the search yields results, administrators will have access to the exact dates and times an email was processed by FOSE as well the results of the filtering (e.g., rejected, quarantined, delivered).

A comprehensive set of historical reports provide detailed statistics about customer email traffic and are a valuable tool for gaining insight and into any email system. Reporting on an e-mail occurs within one hour of the email entering the Exchange Hosted Services network. Reports can be generated by domain or entire organization and provide filtering information on spam.

This service was previously known as Microsoft Exchange Hosted Filtering

SERVICE DETAILS

• Increases security by stopping threats before they reach the corporate network
• Lower total cost of ownership than on-premise solutions
• Predictable subscription-based payment
• Quick and easy to deploy—just an MX change
• Simplifies IT environment by removing the need to deploy, configure, monitor, and update in-house e-mail security solutions
• Reduces load on servers and Internet bandwidth
• Scales to meet the needs of any enterprise
• Continual and fast deployment of anti-malware updates
• Intelligent spam-detection algorithms to catch all forms of spam including image spam and PDF spam
• Multiple antivirus engines for maximum malware protection
• Powerful heuristic engines to detect unknown threats
• Flexible policy filter that supports wildcards and regular expressions
• Recipient validation and custom filtering for groups via Directory Services
• EHS Directory Synchronization Tool shares email address and safe-sender information in Microsoft Active Directory with EHS Directory Services [Exchange Servers only].
• Near real-time reporting that covers all aspects of the filtering service
• Message Trace tool for real-time status of an email
• Automatic email queuing if destination server cannot be reached
• TLS-enabled network for secure delivery
• SLAs covering network reliability and filtering effectiveness and accuracy
• Infrastructure: network uptime of 99.999%
• Email delivery: average delivery commitment of less than two minutes
• Virus Blocking: 100% protection against all known email viruses
• Spam Capture: capture of at least 95% of all inbound spam emails
• False Positive Ratio: false positive commitment of less than 1 in 250,000 emails

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