Review: Secure Computing IronMail

By Patrick Love, Head of Fiduciary Support, Global Wealth Sol on Apr 13, 2007 12:00AM

Secure Computing's IronMail appliance can protect against many outside email threats, including viruses, spam, and phishing.

It has a high sense of outbound security as well, with the ability to examine email leaving the enterprise. This appliance includes compliance filters that can be set to look for many things in outgoing email such as credit card numbers or other possible data leakage.

We found this product to be simple to set up and easy to use. The initial configuration wizard gets the device up in just a few clicks and then the web-based GUI takes over. The IronMail web interface is well-organised with simple tab-top navigation. This interface also features a multitude of easy-to-read graphs and charts that plot trends and show many other events.

This appliance comes loaded with a lot of default rules already set, so it is pretty much ready to be deployed right into the network and start filtering immediately.

It also has many different rule types, which means setting a full compliance policy is possible for any type of environment. However, if you wish to customise the product to your environment rule setting is a snap.

Documentation included with the IronMail appliance consists of a small setup guide and a documentation CD that features the user guide. The setup guide does a great job of getting the user familiar with the appliance and the deployment options.

It also leads the user through the initial configuration wizard. The much larger PDF user guide details all aspects of the manual and its capabilities with screenshots and examples.

Secure Computing offers both phone and email support around the clock. There is also online help via a dedicated area on the website, which includes downloads, documentation and a knowledge base.

Deployments for the IronMail appliance can range significantly in cost. A lot of the functionality of the appliance is purchased in pieces, which makes it flexible to adapt to environments of any size.

As an example, an organisation with 2,500 users can range anywhere from around £10,000 to £18,000 (A$24,423 & A$43,962) based on functionality requirements. At the high end, this is only just above £7 (A$17.08) per user. This device offers a lot of functionality at an attractive price

For: Easy deployment with a lot of policies already in place
Against: Nothing we could find during this test
Verdict: For its power and relatively low cost of ownership, we rate Secure Computing IronMail as our Best Buy in this category