Acceptable Use and Behaviour Policies

In a broader sense Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) regarding email and their content encompass the kind of activities and internal policies described in the Internal Privacy Protection and Corporate Compliance section. In the more familiar context, we’re talking about the risk of harassment, discrimination and distribution of offensive or pornographic material.

Much publicized cases of sexual harassment suits with settlements of hundreds of thousands and occasionally millions of dollars certainly highlight the financial and legal risks. Beyond these financial penalties more recent research establishes a clear, measurable negative impact on productivity, not just for the victim of the harassment but for entire employee teams. Eliminating harassment not only makes good moral and legal sense – it also makes good business sense.

For years anti-spam technologies have filtered incoming email for sexual or pornographic content and offensive, discriminatory and harassing language. Nemx has leveraged over a decade of experience in providing such anti-spam solutions and SecurExchange utilizes our advanced techniques and methods to also monitor outgoing and internal email for this same offensive content. Since most instances of sexual harassment and racial, religious or other discrimination occur between employees it is absolutely essential to monitor internal email correspondence – something SecurExchange does (because its highly integrated with MS Exchange Server) but which many competitive solutions can’t because they are built on perimeter, externally managed, or appliance-based architectures which never see internal email.

More than simple keyword detection

SecurExchange provides a level of flexibility and granular control unequalled by other systems. Naturally, your AUP would prohibit any obviously pornographic, sexually harassing or discriminatory content from being delivered to any recipient – internal or external. But what about outbound email that wouldn’t be classed as harassment, discrimination or offensive but contained strong language (i.e. a curse word, "you idiot", etc.)? If destined for a customer or partner while it may not be legally offensive it certainly doesn’t convey the corporate culture, respect and image you desire. SecurExchange with its advanced intelligent content analysis and concept-based monitoring provides the necessary level of control to identify the combination of an outbound or internal message with questionable content and take appropriate action. The Smart Action Trigger (SAT) in this case may simply be to prevent delivery and generate a non-delivery report (NDR) back to the original sender with a notification to change the language.

Another example of an AUP in the context of corporate information protection would be a policy that specifies that any sensitive corporate information sent by email to an external address be encrypted and digitally signed via the SMIME standard. SecurExchange optimizes performance by allowing internal emails to be transmitted unencrypted, in accordance with policy, but using a specialized Smart Action Trigger can automatically encrypt and digitally sign the outbound email.

A number of the SecurExchange Family of products can address Acceptable Use and Behaviour issues:

To find out more about protecting your Exchange Server environment and dealing with your business email challenges, visit Nemx SecurExchange or contact us today!

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