Outbound Email Protection and DLP
When email protection comes to mind, the first thoughts are protecting the company from any inbound threats such as viruses and spam email. However what about threats leaving the company, as in outbound email, this needs to be considered, monitored and acted upon as well. The risks when not filtering outbound email are as follows;
Spreading viruses and other malicious threats to customers and partners.
Loss of confidential data such as financial data and customer personal information, also known as data leakage prevention.
Also the release of illegal or unacceptable content that damages your company's reputation, whether this is accidental or deliberate needs to be controlled. Email from employees need to be monitored and controlled, just as much as inbound email. At the very least outbound email should be scanned for viruses.
Some email firewalls come with built in DLP protection where it is able to scan for payment data, social security numbers and so on.
