MessageLabs, Telstra Team to Secure Broadband

MessageLabs has continued its push into the small-to-midsize-business (SMB) sector by partnering with Telstra in Australia to provide a spam and phishing filtering bundle with the telco’s newly announced Business Broadband plans.

Telstra’s SMB plans come in a choice of packages, including Business Broadband Starter for small business, Business Broadband Advantage for growing businesses and Business Broadband BDSL for larger established businesses.

Both MessageLabs’ Web Protect and E-mail Protect services will form part of the standard offering for Telstra’s Business Broadband Advantage plan and Business Broadband BDSL.

MessageLabs Asia-Pacific Vice President James Scollay said the move represents Telstra’s “desire” to supply a guaranteed service outcome.

MessageLabs claims to deliver its customers a 100 percent virus-free service and a 95 percent stop rate against spam.

“Guaranteed outcomes are really powerful for the SMB market,” Scollay said. “It signifies an interesting trend in the market where SMBs don’t want to buy security as a separate thing; rather, they want the all-in-one solution.”

Although the MessageLabs solution will provide Internet-level protection, Scollay cautioned SMBs to still be vigilant of internal threats.

“We recommend a multilayer approach,” he said. “While we cover the protection at the Internet level for the bulk of the threat, it’s always a good idea to have antivirus at the desktop level because anyone can threaten the internal network with an infected USB or CD.”

-Mitchell Bingemann, Computerworld Australia

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