Microsoft Adds Mobile Email Protection for Exchange

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With an eye to mobile access, Microsoft Exchange is building in protection for the intellectual property and sensitive information stored in email.

Email access on mobile phones provides necessary, but risky, access to sensitive corporate information on both BYOD and corporate-owned devices. An integration with Skycure will allow IT to control whether a risky or compromised device has access to Exchange email resources.

Skycure for Exchange calculates a Mobile Threat Risk Score which acts as a kind of “credit score,” to measure the risk of threat exposure for mobile devices. Factors that affect the risk score include: Recent threats the devices were exposed to such as network threats or malware, device vulnerabilities, configuration, as well as user behavior. Rankings of high, medium, low and minimal risk are calculated based on the number, significance, and recency of factors and assigned to the device in real-time.

“Email is the number one way enterprises exchange information,” said Adi Sharabani, CEO of Skycure. “Private corporate data could be leaving your network without your knowledge through a risky or compromised mobile device. Our goal has always been to create seamless strategies for enterprises to ensure that only security-compliant devices have access to key organizational resources, and email is the most ubiquitous resource.”

Also, when a device enters a high-risk zone, Skycure for Exchange can automatically prevent unauthorized users or apps from accessing email with no manual intervention from IT. In addition, Skycure automatically alerts the user that security policy has been violated and provides information for the user to take appropriate action to resolve the threat. IT departments thus can create granular security and compliance enforcement policies that limit Exchange access by mobile device type, downloaded apps on the device, networks the device connects to, or if they have high-severity unpatched vulnerabilities.

“Not only does Skycure for Exchange help us protect the company from mobile threats, it helps us enforce security policy,” said Amir Kadar, director of IT for Ceragon Networks. “We can now easily see which devices are complying with mobile security policy and which aren’t. Skycure is so valuable to our organization that any device that does not have Skycure installed is automatically blocked from accessing email—a feature the Exchange integration makes easy.”

The integration will have a far-ranging impact. Microsoft Exchange Server is the most-deployed on-premise messaging and collaboration application, and Office 365 users now match 35% of that installed base.

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