For the past five years, the College of Staten Island has been relying on Proofpoint appliances connected to our Microsoft Exchange email environment to detect and block spam. Due to the recent barrage of emerging threats, inefficient spam filtering, the age of our appliances, and the overall lackadaisical response from Proofpoint in dealing with these threats, Technology Systems has started the process of replacing the Proofpoint appliances with new state-of-the-art, feature-rich appliances.
Based on vendor presentations, industry standards, and appliances in use at other CUNY schools along with the recent shortcomings of Proofpoint, Barracuda was selected. Some of the features of Barracuda consist of:
- Inbound/outbound filtering
- Data leak prevention
- Email encryption
- Intelligence to negate spoofing, phishing, and malware attacks
- Global or per-user quarantine
- Policy enforcement for compliance and corporate policies
- Microsoft Outlook add-in to easily allow for user message classification as spam or not spam, message encryption, and sender whitelisting
- Detection and blocking of Social Security and credit card numbers in emails and attachments
The Barracuda appliances will be phased in to production. During the installation phase, email delivery will not be affected. The main noticeable difference will involve daily digest generation. The digests will be generated by Barracuda instead of Proofpoint.
Technology Systems will review the available features and proceed with a phased-in approach. You will be notified once the appliances have been installed. We will follow up with a guide on how to access the new features provided by these appliances.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at 718.982.2076 or thomas.lauria@csi.cuny.edu.
