Mirapoint’s Product Strategy to Benefit More Users in Staying Secured
Founded in 1997, Mirapoint is the market leader in appliance-based solutions for secure message networks in enterprise, service provider, and education organizations, with more than 115 million mailboxes served and secured worldwide. Mirapoint’s unique appliance model simplifies the task of building and maintaining a Secure Messaging Infrastructure™ that can meet the new messaging needs of the enterprise. Mirapoint’s appliances deliver bullet-proof security and superior performance with ‘five-nines’ reliability, while dramatically reducing the cost of enterprise messaging. When Mirapoint appliances work together as integrated building blocks of an enterprise messaging infrastructure, the result is even more powerful. They provide a centrally-managed messaging infrastructure that can meet today’s needs for security, reliability and compliance, and address new requirements like group collaboration, mobile access and instant messaging.
In the following interview, Jaspal Kohli, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of Mirapoint, a market leader in appliance-based solutions for secure message networks, discusses with Rake Narang, Chief Editor of Info Security Products Guide, the intensity of security threats and investing in the proper technologies and products to stay secured.
Rake Narang, Chief Editor - Info Security Products Guide:What are the common problems that users (security) are facing today? Are most products and solutions available today able to provide the level of security users need and demand? Jaspal Kohli, Mirapoint: The problems fall under two main categories – ones faced by end users and the administrators who are in charge of providing a secure infrastructure. End users are being exposed to various threats that detract from the overall email experience. While SPAM messages are more of an annoyance, threats like viruses, malware and phishing pose dangers like disruption of services, identity theft and loss of privacy. Because email is increasingly being used for various types of business and mission critical applications, it is very important for users to easily establish a high level of trust in the communication medium. They need to be able to establish the identity of the sender, ensure that the content is not tampered with and maintain privacy when needed. Ease of use is also an important consideration where aspects of maintaining security must be exposed to the end-user.
Administrators are finding that scalability and reliability of the overall infrastructure is becoming an increasing challenge in the face of email security threats. The core protocol for email transmission (SMTP or Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) does not require authentication. The burden of managing the incoming flow of messages between legitimate mail and threats lies primarily on the receiving infrastructure. A sudden large influx of threats can leave the infrastructure incapable of dealing with legitimate mail in a timely fashion. Furthermore, it may also burden other parts of the infrastructure (e.g. network, directory, storage, etc.) if it not architected correctly. Administrators also need the appropriate tools to monitor and manage the security infrastructure. This includes real-time monitoring, trend analysis, reports, etc. Enterprise deployments are also concerned about inbound and outbound content control. Another important aspect of email security is the ability to provide an archival solution for regulatory compliance.
Rake Narang:What is Mirapoint’s target segment of the industry and how is your company focusing on it’s product portfolio? Jaspal Kohli: Mirapoint’s unique appliance architecture coupled with our ability to provide a complete email messaging solution makes our products appealing to multiple market segments. Our target segments are medium-to-large enterprises, Education and Service Providers (including hosting services for businesses).
Mirapoint is continuing to evolve its product portfolio to address the needs of both the end-users and administrators discussed earlier. We are committed to protect users from email threats using the best of breed technology developed in house as well as with partners who specialize in certain aspects. From an infrastructure perspective, we are focused on continual improvements in scalability and manageability. We are also working on ways to improve the administrator’s ability to manage the infrastructure (in terms of defining policies, monitoring the performance and managing capacity, etc.).
"Mirapoint has partnered with IBM to create an 'appliance blade' for email security. This is a combination of the IBM BladeCenter server hardware and the Mirapoint MOS (Message Operating System). It preserves the key appliance benefits of MOS while leveraging key advantages of blade hardware in terms of scalability and overall RAS."
Jaspal Kohli, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer - Mirapoint
Rake Narang: What are spammers and hackers planning next? Are users aware of the intensity of threats that are possible today? How will investing in the proper technologies and products today keep users secured for tomorrow?
Jaspal Kohli: It has been very difficult for our industry at large to predict when and what spammers and hackers will do next. While most users are aware of the types of threats and the dangers they pose, many do not realize that they are very vulnerable from an overall infrastructure standpoint. The most important investment users can make is to deploy products that are designed to adapt and scale with the type and magnitude of threats.
Rake Narang:Tell us more about your recent product collaboration with IBM. How will this joint collaboration benefit the actual users?
Jaspal Kohli: Mirapoint has been a pioneer in bringing the appliance concept to the email world. Our email security and server appliances in a rackmount form factor are now widely deployed across market segments. Mirapoint has partnered with IBM to create an “appliance blade” for email security. This is a combination of the IBM BladeCenter server hardware and the Mirapoint MOS (Message Operating System). It preserves the key appliance benefits of MOS (e.g. secure unified administration, fully integrated and tested platform, unified upgrades, etc.) while leveraging key advantages of blade hardware in terms of scalability and overall RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability).
RazorGate on IBM BladeCenter complements the rackmount appliances in segments of the market driven by high demands for performance density and/or server consolidation. These could be environments that need to run a large number of RazorGate appliances or want to consolidate multiple security applications onto a unified hardware platform. The user benefits include savings in space, infrastructure costs (e.g. overall hardware costs, hardware redundancy across applications), operational costs (power, cooling, etc.) and improved serviceability (e.g. hot swap of servers).
"Rising and belligerent email threats, risks of an unreceptive security environment and pressure for timely regulatory compliances have all created a need for more scalable and manageable messaging solutions. Mirapoint has raised the bar on messaging security by combining the IBM BladeCenter server hardware with it's powerful Mirapoint MOS (Message Operating System)."
Rake Narang , Chief Editor - Info Security Products Guide
Rake Narang:Will the Mirapoint's RazorGate on IBM BladeCenter provide the same benefits as a RazorGate appliance available from Mirapoint’s directly? Will there be a separate “Product Roadmap” for both product offerings in the near future, (if not how will your product management focus on ensuring the same features and performance for both)? Jaspal Kohli: Customers running RazorGate on IBM BladeCenter will experience all the same benefits of Mirapoint’s MOS software. This includes all aspects of managing the appliance and the various security features (e.g. best of breed anti-virus and anti-spam, unique edge blocking, extensive content filtering, etc.).
Mirapoint has architected MOS to be a single software release that supports multiple appliance platforms. Specific aspects of a platform are dynamically configured. We expect to continue supporting a single product roadmap that includes RazorGate on IBM BladeCenter.
Rake Narang: How are the messaging needs of enterprises going to change over the coming months? Are Mirapoint’s products and solutions designed to scale and meet the ever growing spamming and virus threats? Jaspal Kohli: Enterprises will need to continue combating the email security threats (viruses, malware, SPAM, etc.) with a scalable, reliable and adaptive solution. In addition, they will need to address requirements around secure and authenticated email, content security and compliance. Mirapoint’s key values include the appliance architecture, unique edge blocking solutions around a multi-layered defense and our ability to provide a complete secure email solution. This puts us in a unique position to combat email threats and meet the other requirements around email security.
Mirapoint’s Mail Servers have a hardened OS, one that's difficult to break into. A major car manufacturer in Germany actually ran a third party security audit by ethical hackers against our system. We were told we were only the second vendor product (the first mail solution) that they were unable to crack into.
Scalability and reliability has always been a hallmark for Mirapoint’s server appliances. Mirapoint appliances has field proven 99.999% uptime, based on the actual monitoring of hundreds of deployed Mirapoint systems, which equates to less than 6 minutes of downtime a year. Many Mirapoint customers state that their Mirapoint solutions have simply never gone down. Further, our appliances can easily scales to millions of users in a single network with centralized administration and management. We are raising that to a new level with RazorGate on IBM BladeCenter product.
Jaspal Kohli is the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Mirapoint. He has been with Mirapoint since its inception as a founding member of the engineering team. Mr. Kohli leads the technology group to ensure Mirapoint's leadership now and into the future. Mr. Kohli possesses more than 20 years of senior technical experience: including experience in a broad array of technology areas from processor/system architecture and operating systems, to databases and distributed objects, networking protocols, high availability, replication and diagnostics. Before coming to Mirapoint, Mr. Kohli worked at Netscape Communications, at HaL Computer Systems, at Pyramid Technology and at Intel Corporation and BiiN. He has an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison and a Bachelors of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the IIT of New Dehli.
