SCIENCE

Fortinet has announced the highly versatile FortiMail-3000C messaging security appliance, which delivers secure email processing breakthroughs designed to satisfy the most demanding corporate messaging environments -- supporting up to 50,000 users with a single system. Featuring a 20-percent performance improvement over its predecessors, the FortiMail-3000C is ideally suited for large enterprises and application service and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, especially those subject to PCI/DSS or HIPAA regulations in retail, payment, financial and healthcare industries.

The FortiMail-3000C features important server mode enhancements made possible by the new FortiMail 4.0 MR2 operating software, which enables the appliance to function as a full-featured SMTP mail server supporting secure POP3, IMAP and Web mail clients. This capability is ideal for companies that want to replace aging mail servers, combine email functions into a single device and for offering secure email services to remote offices.

To help ensure the secure delivery of confidential or regulated content to customers, partners or employees, the FortiMail-3000C offers Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) that enables encrypted messages to be sent without the need for any user provisioning or additional hardware. FortiMail IBE is unique in providing "push" or "pull" delivery options. This allows encrypted emails to be delivered directly to users and/or stored on the FortiMail appliance for retrieval, making the system extremely easy to deploy and use. In addition, the system features customizable and predefined dictionaries that detect the accidental or intentional loss of confidential or regulated data. This enables administrators to block messages containing data matching a range of patterns including credit card, social security, insurance and bank routing numbers. Alternatively, policies can be created to require the encryption of messages containing this data to help organizations achieve HIPAA and PCI/DSS compliance.

Using the same form factor and antispam, antivirus and anti-spyware protection afforded by other FortiMail devices, the FortiMail-3000C features an extra CPU, 16 gigabytes of RAM and a fiber interface, all of which are designed to deliver high performance. The system is designed to route up to 1.2 million emails per hour and 1.1 million emails per hour with FortiGuard Antispam and Antivirus. The FortiMail-3000C supports up to a total of six terabytes of RAID 1/5/10/50 storage capacity with hot-swap hard drives.

In addition to the new FortiMail-3000C platform, Fortinet is also announcing the upcoming availability of FortiMail 4.0 MR2 operating system. The enhancements to FortiMail 4.0 MR2 include improvements to productivity and security.

Security enhancements include increased access control and expanded dictionary-based policy enforcement:

--  Address Groups -- Create access control rules for groups of user email or IP addresses.

--  Dictionary Triggered Archive -- Allows dictionary contents to be used to trigger email archiving in addition to sender/recipient and keyword values.

There are several improvements to the Server mode functionality designed to boost productivity, including:

--  Calendar Function -- Provides a calendar for scheduling events and sending invites via the webmail interface.

--  Address Book -- Supports extended search information, user group creation and LDAP server synchronization.

"In these budget-tightening times, total-cost-of-ownership is a crucial selection criteria for messaging security solutions," said Michael Xie, founder, CTO and vice president of engineering at Fortinet. "We've paid close attention to this market dynamic which is why we don't use expensive and complex per-seat licensing models. And, unlike competing offerings that frequently cobble together third-party antivirus or other protection schemes, we offer customers real-time updates directly from our FortiGuard threat prevention services."

Availability The FortiMail-3000C appliance is available now. FortiMail 4.0 MR2 will be available in Q1 2011.