Email Security Service Resiliency

Solution Brief

Ensure Modern Business Continuity with Area 1’s Adaptive Message Pooling

PROBLEM: Businesses suffer when mission-critical emails get delayed or disrupted.

SOLUTION: Area 1 Security’s cloud-first, scalable infrastructure and features ensure business continuity and prevent email downtime, with continuous email flow.

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OVERVIEW

In today’s modern enterprise, email is mission-critical for all businesses. As the entire world embraced digital transformation seemingly overnight, email has become the lifeblood of communication across organizations large and small, allowing for business continuity despite widespread uncertainty.

With email already the preferred threat vector for attackers, it’s essential that cloud email security services both protect against threats and provide the necessary resiliency, availability and scalability required for customers to conduct business. In short, modern email requires modern email security that can handle cloud workloads and sophisticated attacks.

From our inherent architecture to our core service features, Area 1 Security’s cloud-native service has been designed to maintain industry-leading high availability and operational resilience so our customers’ business operations are not impacted by outages. Through features like Adaptive Message Pooling, our dynamically scalable service is capable of handling massive message spikes to make sure benign emails reach inboxes while blocking email, web and social media-based threats.

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OPERATIONAL RESILIENCY WITH INDUSTRY-LEADING ASSURANCES

Area 1 Security has upheld a long track record of reliability and holds our service to enterprise-class high availability. Our service has consistently maintained annual rates of five-nines availability to meet the needs of the most demanding global organizations. From conception to implementation, we put a tremendous amount of thought and detail into ensuring resilient systems.

Area 1 Security is a multi-tenant, cloud-native service built on a combination of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Our provider-diverse and geographically-diverse cloud platform covers multiple continents including regions in the Eastern and Western United States and Europe. Each region also includes multiple availability zones, so we’re capable of automatic load-scaling with seamless failovers.

We don’t just rely solely on cloud providers for availability. Our customers rely on us to keep their mail flowing, so we’ve built redundancy into the Area 1 Security platform itself. With native fault tolerance and extensive failover capabilities, the Area 1 service continues to run even if a given cloud provider’s region is down. We also perform continuous self-monitoring so that our automated systems are always aware of potential issues and can proactively adjust accordingly.

ENSURING BUSINESS-CRITICAL EMAIL FLOW

To ensure high availability and uninterrupted email flow for our customers, the Area 1 Security service accounts for unforeseen circumstances like service provider outages as well as the common but erratic traffic spike. Traffic spikes could be due to factors ranging from planned business reasons (e.g. traffic rush during seasonal events), to intentional denial of service (DoS) attacks (e.g. SMTP flood attacks), to the frequent scenario of errant applications inadvertently overwhelming mailboxes with application messages delivered over SMTP.

To address these and similar scenarios, Area 1 Security includes the unique ability to automatically pool messages using Adaptive Message Pooling, dynamically adjusting resources and provisioning additional TCP connection clusters to handle traffic and message spikes while ensuring that an organization’s email traffic remains unaffected. Our customers are able to proactively assess and monitor the system’s availability at all times through these events.

In contrast, some legacy Secure Email Gateways (SEGs), whether on-premise or cloud-hosted, cannot keep up with these unpredictable spikes due to their appliance-based architecture. In fact, our Adaptive Message Pooling’s autoscaling of TCP connects and SMTP traffic and automatic queuing can help account for and mitigate downstream gateway unavailability.

ADAPTIVE MESSAGE POOLING CASE STUDY

A large, global F500 organization in the financial vertical typically receives a message volume of 1 million per day. During spike events, message volumes can more than double to 2.5 million messages per day. While some spike events can be anticipated, a large majority of these events are unplanned.
With their legacy cloud-hosted Secure Email Gateway, the organization was struggling to deal with these spikes, leading to widespread email delays and bounce-backs, significantly impacting business.
The customer deployed Area 1 Security in front of their existing gateway, allowing Area 1 to handle incoming email traffic from the internet.

By deploying Area 1 Security, the customer was able to address traffic spikes in a seamless manner, while ensuring the highest levels of security for their organization.

MODERN BUSINESS CONTINUITY

Today’s cloud-based email environments require modern solutions for resiliency from outages, traffic spikes and threat actors. Organizations need to invest in email security with the following characteristics in order to ensure resiliency from business disruptions.

We know our customers place enormous trust and responsibility in us in processing one of their most mission-critical business applications — email. Whether you’re just transitioning to a hybrid cloud environment or already well along the digital transformation journey, Area 1 helps organizations secure email and maintain modern business continuity.

Area 1 Security’s true cloud-scale, multi-tenant service is purpose-built to handle the demands of today’s email traffic and address anomalous events that can overwhelm legacy architectures, all while preemptively protecting against phishing and other email, web and social-media based threats.

To learn more about Area 1 Security’s built-in resiliency and how we help protect organizations against today’s threats, request a free trial.