Enterprise-Level Security for Small Businesses

Cheryl England, PC World

If you run a small business, you've probably often wished you had the resources that the big guys do when it comes to implementing new technology--especially if that technology can help secure your data. Recently, Postini announced that it will begin offering services to companies with 5 to 250 employees. Its service filters e-mail to weed out viruses, worms, and other threats; it either eliminates suspicious messages or moves them into quarantine, and alerts the user. (At press time, Google announced that it would acquire Postini.)

Postini is teaming up with Iomega, best known as the company that brought you the Zip drive. In addition to maintaining its traditional focus on storage, Iomega is branching out into security and data-recovery services, making the company a logical choice to help Postini reach a broader market. While the message-filtering technology remains the same, Postini is taking advantage of Iomega's infrastructure and sales channel, which is attuned to serving smaller businesses--a group that Postini has not previously targeted.

The result of the partnership is Iomega's new service, called "Iomega OfficeScreen Managed Email Security and Spam Defense--Powered by Postini." Though quite the mouthful, the service is easy to implement and manage. Either Iomega or a VAR sets it up on an off-site hosted system that Postini manages. Because Postini handles all of its customers via its central systems, smaller businesses receive the same updates that large enterprises do--no manual updating is necessary. Pricing averages about $35 per user per year. For more information, go to www.iomega.com.