With confidential business and personal information often attached to e-mail messages, e-mail security for insurance carriers is no longer a one-way street of incoming messages. Keeping e-mail servers free of spam definitely is one challenge faced by all IT departments. However, IT leaders also need to focus on the security of e-mail messages employees send out.
The spam issue attracts the most attention because users see their Inbox clogged with everything from great stock deals to the best knockoff watches money can buy. For a smaller insurer such as North Dakota-based Nodak Mutual Insurance Company, the goal was keeping the network secure, according to Herb Doele, Nodak's director of networking services. "We had the firewall in place, but we really didn't have a good feel for what other things might be going on," he says. "We wanted to make sure the appliances we had for security actually were doing what we thought they were doing."
Although Nodak had not budgeted for any additional security in 2005, when the carrier conducted an exposure assessment, some eyes were opened among upper management. "We felt it was something we needed to act on quickly," indicates Doele.
Nodak sampled a few vendors but became sold on BEW Global after sitting in on a Web seminar to learn more about the security issues the insurer faced. Doele relates it was obvious the company needed a spam filter, but BEW offered more than just the filter. "[The product] allowed us to do some filtering of our outgoing e-mail, as well," he says.
Doele explains the carrier sends confidential information to banks and other vendors, and Nodak wanted to ensure whatever sensitive information left the network was secure and encrypted.
The BEW solution for Nodak had three pieces–a spam filter, a secure e-mail gateway, and a monitoring tool, notes Doele. The spam filter examines incoming messages to see whether they contain private information. If so, the system has rules in the spam filter to send the message to the secure e-mail gateway. Users then are notified the incoming e-mail is encrypted.
Employees certainly are appreciative of the spam filters, Doele points out. "We were getting hit pretty hard," he says. "We knew we were going to have to do something, and we moved pretty fast on this project. So far, we've been pretty happy with it."
Sending out encrypted messages gives Nodak a jump on what the carrier believes will be increasing security regulations for insurers. Although Nodak is a mutual company, Doele suggests smaller companies such as Nodak will be feeling more pressure from regulators. "We wanted to be more proactive in making sure we had things in line so we didn't have to scramble," he says. "We wanted to be ahead of things."
Fighting spammers is a continuous job, and Doele reports the filters still miss the occasional spam e-mail, but BEW provides support in removing similar messages. "If there is something getting through that shouldn't be, we have [BEW] take a look at our configuration and tweak it a little so we can isolate the spam before it gets through," he says.
The bigger issue now for Doele is dealing with the false positives that occur. "It adds a little extra in overhead as we deal with stuff that gets caught in the filters," he remarks. "We take a quick look at it to see whether we should send it on through."
Today, the majority of the spam that hits the Nodak servers is removed, and that has relieved some of the storage issues the carrier faced. The company also is able to filter out messages with video clips that rob the company of bandwidth. "You have a savings on storage plus bandwidth and the potential to keep out viruses," says Doele of the advantages derived from the system. "Plus, there is a benefit in time savings for all employees. They don't have to delete 20 or 30 spam messages from their Inbox in the morning before they get started with work."
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