One of the concerns people sometimes have about switching to Hosted Exchange – our cloud email platform – is about security. As with any cloud service, Hosted Exchange means placing your business data (emails, contact details, diary entries and so on) in the hands of a trusted supplier. How do you know they’ll keep it safe?

Here’s the good news: safety and security are two of the most important elements of Hosted Exchange. They’re absolutely central because if we couldn’t prove Hosted Exchange is safe, who would ever use it?

In fact, Hosted Exchange is already used by millions of people around the globe. That indicates both that they trust it, and that the system has been thoroughly tested in the real world.

Thorough email filtering

With Hosted Exchange, when someone sends you an email it doesn’t come straight to your servers. Instead, it comes to your provider’s servers. They filter it before sending it on to the correct mailbox in your business. And it’s that filtering process that helps keep Hosted Exchange safe.

Before an email reaches you, we’ve run around 90 tests on it to make sure it’s safe. Hosted Exchange checks that the sender’s email address is genuine and scans the content and any attachments for viruses and malware.

That’s the basic filtering process. But we can also help you set up extra security features, like building a blacklist of email addresses which you know are harmful, or creating a whitelist of email addresses which you know are safe.

You can even choose whether to review spam email before it gets deleted, or opt to simply bin it without ever having to set eyes on it.

The benefits of Hosted Exchange

It’s not just the filtering capabilities of Hosted Exchange that help it stay secure. In fact, because your email comes through an externally-managed server, rather than one in your business, it’s easier to deflect large volumes of spam without slowing the rate at which legitimate emails are sent and delivered.

The pressure is taken by our servers (which are designed to cope) rather than by yours. The same goes for viruses, malware and other threats. Because the email servers are further removed from your company, there’s much less chance of problems.

You can learn more about Hosted Exchange on our website. But if you have any questions at all, just give us a call. We’ll be happy to explain how the service works and what steps we take to keep it secure.

Photo Credit: Simon Cocks