|
UK firms face email melt-down
06/08/05
Thousands of small businesses are in danger of their email systems
collapsing as employees heading off on summer breaks send and receive
holiday photographs and even videos as huge email attachments.
British messaging and collaboration software company Softalk says that
small and medium sized businesses are particularly vulnerable as they
don't have large IT departments to manage and monitor their email
systems.
"For many small and medium sized businesses email is now as important
if not more important than phone calls and traditional post," said
Simon Bates, director of Softalk. "Yet many businesses are relying on
old email systems that they first implemented when email first became
widely available and before it became a business critical system."
Softalk says that businesses can take some simple steps to ensure the
integrity of their email systems:
• Use the email server to set limits for maximum size of attachments
that can be sent and received
•
Set quotas for individual users mailboxes to prevent employees using
the email server for storing hundreds of megabytes of personal
photographs and videos
•
Use the email server to prevent users from sending or receiving
certain types of attachment
•
Install up to date anti-virus filters to prevent viruses slipping
through disguised as holiday pictures
•
Install anti-spam filters to cut down on the amount of unproductive
email clogging up users in-boxes
•
Implement anti-virus and anti-spam security at the email server level
so that you can always ensure that filters are up to date without the
need to update every individual user’s PC
•
Have clear policies in place so that employees understand how they are
allowed the company email system for personal use
• Ensure that policies include rules to ensure that employees don’t
send or receive inappropriate images
•
Check that your email server is robust enough and has the capacity to
cope with the demands of today’s email traffic which has increased
from an average of 15 billion emails a day in 2001 to an average of
132 billion a day in 2005.
•
Ensure that you are backing up and archiving your email database on a
frequent and regular basis
© Copyright Screen-Studio.com
2005
|
