The new feature is included in the Webroot^® Web Security Service. By inspecting applications and analyzing them via the cloud, the Webroot service can automatically and efficiently identify threats and vulnerabilities as well as identify missing patches. The service is linked to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Vulnerability Database, ensuring the latest threats are included in the scan.

“Having vulnerability scanning added to the award-winning Webroot Web Security Service is a real winner,” said Bob Stevens, owner and president, Blended Systems, a Webroot channel partner in metro Atlanta. “I can now offer an even more effective tool to customers with no impact on user performance.”

Also included in the update is a new layer of antispyware detection. In addition to monitoring outbound traffic from a system, Webroot now automatically analyzes the processes running on the user’s computer. This additional layer of protection ensures that threats are identified before they have a chance to spread. The service tests for more than 3,500 known malicious programs today and is continually updated for the latest threats.

Webroot’s vulnerability scanning takes less than 15 seconds and leverages the cloud for up-to-date vulnerabilities and spyware definitions to help ensure endpoints are secure. Focusing on the programs most susceptible to malicious attacks, a lightweight scan at the endpoint uploads process information to the cloud, where Webroot identifies vulnerabilities and centralizes results in a Web-based management portal. Administrators can search and sort by machine, user, type of scan and number of vulnerabilities and then drill down to view information about each machine or threat.

“Organizations are finding that vulnerability assessments that are mired on the desktop are becoming more burdensome and less effective,” said Gerhard Eschelbeck, chief technology officer, Webroot. “Leveraging the cloud, we’re enabling organizations to aggressively monitor their IT infrastructure without worrying about its affect on user productivity, and with much better protection than traditional solutions.”

For a demonstration the new Vulnerability Scanning register to attend a Webinar on June 15, 2010. To evaluate Webroot Web Security, contact us via email or call us at 770-603-0300.

Webroot Threat Blog: http://blog.webroot.com.

Follow Webroot on Twitter: http://twitter.com/webroot.

©2009 Webroot Software, Inc. All rights reserved. Webroot is a registered trademark of Webroot Software, Inc. in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.

Cloud computing will take such a stranglehold on the market as companies try to reduce hardware spending that Gartner has made the bold proclamation that one-fifth of all businesses will own absolutely no IT assets come 2012.

Gartner’s forecast signals a massive market shift and opens the door for solution providers to find a new revenue stream with cloud-based services as they help clients migrate from legacy hardware and software environments to the cloud.

The mass exodus away from physical IT assets, which will leave one in five businesses, or 20 percent, without IT assets, is being fueled by a number of factors including cloud computing and cloud-enabled services and virtualization, according to Gartner, which issued its top IT predictions this week.

While the cloud is one of the main contributors to the move away from physical IT, the change is also the product of employees running personal desktops and notebook systems on corporate networks, which reduces the need for organizations to buy PCs.

“The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee’s desk, will not go away,” Gartner said in a statement. “However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.”

The 20 percent migration away from hardware and other IT assets by 2012 jibes with Gartner’s overall cloud computing market forecasts. According to Gartner, the cloud computing market will compound at an annual rate of 28 percent from $47 billion in 2008 to $126 billion by 2012. The cloud computing market will hit $150 billion in 2013, Gartner said.

Why the big growth? Several reasons. It used to be that only heavily regulated businesses were required to archive their email. With the coming of several well publicized legal cases in which email messages played a critical part, legal discovery became a second driver. E-discovery has become such a large part of litigation today that several states are now requiring businesses to archive their email. Today, most organizations are looking to archive their email for some combination of three reasons.

• Compliance/record retention

Records retention has been a business requirement for decades. Highly regulated industries have sets of regulations specific to their type of business. Financial broker-dealers must comply with both the SEC‘s Rule 17a and FINRA guidelines. These rules define the kinds of records to be retained and the supervision of communications to ensure that the guidelines are followed. Even governmental agencies and state and local governments must retain and make records (including email communications) available. The SOX Act reinforced the need to include electronic records as part of a business’ records retention plan.

While there have been several attempts to roll back the scope of these regulations, most are and will continue to be a significant driver for email archiving.

• Legal discovery

While legal discovery is tied to compliance because it is subject to disclosure, the FRPC revisions of 2006 addressed the requirements of retention and discovery of ESI and its production during discovery. It also laid out that corporate management is responsible for the management and storage of these records. The revision of the FRPC has been a wake-up call to legal teams to bring electronic records management under control. The IT department now has to document and comply with records-retention policies while having to deal with the ever growing data storage issue exacerbated by these policies.

The optimal system allows for the retention of only those records required for just the length of time required and no longer. Unfortunately, neither of these is easily defined for most businesses. In an effort to deal with this problem, some organizations set a policy to retain email either for a short period of time or to retain all email forever. Both extremes have obvious problems.

When a legal situation comes up, the organization may need to apply a “legal hold” on specific data suspending the deletion of data according to a court order. This legal hold means that the specified data must be kept beyond the normal end of life specified in the records retention policy. Identifying the specific data and complying with such an order is difficult and therefore expensive without adequate email archiving. In Petcou v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. the cost of recovering two years of email for a single employees was reported at $79,000.

• Mail server storage management

One of the main benefits of email archiving is the potential for removing older messages from the data store freeing up space and improving email server performance. Typically, IT departments try to limit data stores by requiring email to be migrated to personal archives. This plan is hampered by several problems. First, it degrades the email client performance significantly. Second, personal archives often do not get backed up or become corrupt therefore may be unavailable. Most importantly, when faced with a legal discovery, reassembling the email data to perform queries become more difficult.

To solve this problem some systems began to use message “stubbing”. This process splits the data store and moves the message data (usually the attachments) off to some other storage device leaving just a pointer in the original data store indicating the location of the data. This seems like a good idea however, it just moves the problem from one data store to another. Now there are two local data stores to capitalize, administer, maintain, synchronize and backup.

All these steps have led to the rise of third-party email archiving. A “message gathering” rule or journaling entry is made in the email system copying all or specific messages to a data center which stores and full-text indexes them and data about the messages. This data store can be accessed either by the end user in the case of personal archives or by a legal team in the case of legal or compliance archives.  The data center is responsible for administration, backups, media updates and accessibility. Usually all an organization pays for is a small flat monthly fee per user often for unlimited storage with unlimited retention.

To get a free evaluation of email archiving contact us via email or phone: 770-603-0300.

1. Does your organization sends and stores business records and communications electronically?
2. Does your organization need to preserve electronic records for a long period of time?
3. Do you need ready access to this content?
4. Is email storage a problem?

If the answer is “Yes” to any of these (and it probably is for every commercial, governmental and educational organization), you need an archiving system that can preserve and make this data readily available as needed. So, why do organization resist email archiving? Every organization has it’s own answer but, here are the most common.

Not in the budget

Wouldn’t it be great if all problems could be scheduled and the cleanup/effects budgeted? What an organization is really saying is that they are rolling the dice that some legal issue or regulator won’t come knocking on their door. The cost of complying with a legal hold or e-discovery request will probably far exceed the cost of years of email archiving. In Petcou v. C.H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc. the cost of recovering two years of email for a single employees was reported at $79,000 without email archiving. The cost of most 3^rd party SaaS email archiving is just based on the number of users’ mail being stored not on the amount of space required to store the data.

What these organizations further forget is that having email archiving will give the organization a chance to review the details of a potential issue when it first come up. That can influence a decision to settle early and reduce potential cost or to go to court.

What is in many organizations’ budget is the demand for larger and larger data storage and backup systems for the email data store growth.

We’re not in a regulated industry

Really? Which industry? Does anyone send accounting or personnel information or queries via email? Does anyone send proposals, invoices, or agreements electronically? Do employees gossip or talk about business or non-business topics via the business email or instant message system or workstations? If the answer to any of these is “Yes”, then while you may not be in a specifically regulated industry, all those activities have been requested via e-discovery. The FRPC revisions of 2006 are clear on both which data are to be archived and how as well as that corporate officers are responsible for seeing that it is managed.

We have backups that serve as our archive

Backups are not archives. A backup’s sole function is to provide for restoration of data in the case of the failure of the primary data store. As we said in a previous post, backups fail as archives for two primary reasons:

• Answering an e-discovery request using backups can be extremely expensive and time-consuming. Further, backups can be overwritten and tapes are notorious for failure.
• Backups cannot preserver information created and destroyed between backups. This can lead to failure to comply with statutory retention obligation and legal requirements.

What’s the cost of delay?

Just like your middle-school teacher, judges are not interested in your “My dog ate my homework.” excuse for not having an email archive system. Inadequate archive systems can cause massive financial and business interruptions. Some examples:

• Qualcomm v. Broadcom 3:05-cv-01958, U.S. District Court for Southern California

This patent case illustrates that plaintiffs can lose of they fail to produce evidence in a timely manner. Qualcomm’s attorneys failed to hand over data including 200,000 pages of email and other correspondence until four months after the trial. The judge held that several Qualcomm patents should be rendered invalid. Qualcomm was ordered to pay all of Broadcom’s $10 million legal fees.

• Zubalake v. USB Warburg, 02-cv-1243, U.S. District Court for Southern District of New York

USB was required, at its own expense, to produce all electronic materials relevant to this sexual discrimination suit. During the e-discovery process, USB found that certain backup tapes were missing an that emails had been deleted. The court also found that USB had failed to comply with its own retention policies. USB was ordered to pay the plaintiff $29.3 million.

At the low cost of unlimited archiving available today, economics plays a back seat in the decision making process today. Electronic archiving of email, Instant Message logs and Bloomberg data is now routine.

If you want more information, contact us via email or phone at 770-603-0300.

“Whew, Microsoft to the rescue! Exchange 2010 has built-in email archive, now I don’t have to find a 3^rd party email solution!” Aahh, not quite so fast. Put down the blue bill and take a deep breath.

With Exchange 2010, Microsoft extends the tenuous steps towards email archive made with Exchange 2007. Let’s look at some facts.

Enhancements in Exchange 2010 Archiving

• Personal archives

The new Messaging Retention Management policies that allow users to archive messages without having to move them to a .PST file.

• Retention policies

Exchange 2010 adds tags to help create and manage messages to Exchange 2007′s managed folders. These new tags can include: “Important”, “Archive”, “Don’t Archive”. Each tag has it’s own retention policy. When a user applies a tag to a message the retention policy is automatically applied. Unfortunately, this puts the interpretation of corporate and legal policy in the hands of the user. Automatic tagging and retention systems provide more consistent and reliable retention capabilities.

• Multi-mailbox search

With Exchange 2010, authorized human resources, legal and non-IT compliance professional can search across mailboxes, attachments, calendar items, tasks and contacts. These searches can be performed in mailboxes, Personal Archives as well as Information Rights Protected (IRM)-protected files.

Search criteria includes: sender, recipient (cc and bcc), expiration policy, size of message, sent or received data and regular expressions (RegEx).

• Legal holds

Administrators can immediately preserve users’ deleted and edited primary and Personal Archive mailbox items (email, calendar items, tasks, contacts, etc.). Policies can be set on individuals or enterprise wide and user notification is optional.

Basically, Exchange 2010′s content archiving is better than previous versions. However, compared to 3^rd party email archive solutions, these features are relatively basic and are unlikely to meet most organizations’ email archiving needs.

Still a 1^st Generation Offering

Some 3^rd party email archive vendors have been around for years and their solutions have gone through hundreds of evolutionary changes. As an example, LiveOffice provides 40% of all 3^rd party archiving and has been the vendor of choice for 10 years. Here are some drawbacks on Exchange 2010′s email archive offering.

• Outlook 2010 will be needed to access archives

When Exchange 2010 is released, Outlook 2010 will not be available. Further, most organizations lag in their adoption of version updates. Most Outlook users are still using Outlook 2003. Migrating users to a new version requires massive amounts of user training and help-desk support. Not a likely immediate step given the recent budget constraints.

• Exchange 2010 will not support offline access

The offered .PST files are not a good workaround for travelers needing offline access to archived email.

• Other repositories cannot be searched

Being able to search both the live data store as well as one or more archive dataset is common among most of the  3^rd party email archive solutions, Exchange 2010′s archive does not offer this capability alone.

• Basic e-discovery capability

When faced with any e-discovery request, an organization will have to search across both the live data store as well as all archives. Since most organizations look for email archiving to solve their e-discovery needs, this is a serious drawback.

• No legal holds on public folders

Exchange 2010 will not offer this capability initially. Thus, data in these significant folders cannot be placed on legal hold. This is a major drawback for any organization needing archiving for legal reasons.

• Mail will be stored on the Exchange server

Dealing with Exchange data storage issues is one of the major issues of IT departments. Exchange 2010 email archiving requires that the archive be stored on the Exchange server. Many organizations use email archiving as a way to move data off the Exchange server to an archive solution.

Conclusions

Exchange 2010′s email archiving will be comparable to leading 3^rd party email archive systems about 8 years ago; good but not up to current needs. However, how many organizations are going to migrate (Yes, it is a migration not an upgrade.) to Exchange 2010 while they have put off other budget items in this economy?  Many organizations just finished moving to 2007.

According to a Gartner Report, Microsoft currently has less than 3% of the email archiving business. Microsoft will eventually have a legally adequate version of email archiving.  Organizations using any version of Exchange, LotusNotes (and its derivatives), GroupWise, or pretty much any other email system can avail themselves of a 3^rd party email archive now. A SaaS solution is simple to implement and meets the needs for compliance, legal or personal archiving.

At the low cost of unlimited archiving available today, economics plays a back seat in the decision making process today. Electronic archiving of email, Instant Message logs and Bloomberg data is now routine.

If you want more information, contact us via email or phone at 770-603-0300.

Archive everything? Nothing? Email only? Forever? 30-days?

What Needs To Be Archived?

• Email

For good or ill, email is how we communicate and exchange information. It is that communication stream that must be preserved to meet an organization’s compliance, e-discovery and legal holds. How long and whose email? That’s a question for legal. However, with a flat rate per user for unlimited archive storage it may be easier just to archive it all.

• Electronic files

While documents created and stored in a file system are subject to discovery, they relate to email since many are used as attachments. It is in this context that a document often gains meaning. There are countless examples of document attachments being used on either side of legal actions. It is for this reason that any archiving system must include not just the email but the attachments as well.

• SharePoint, Sametime,  Quickr and other data stored in collaboration systems

Archiving SharePoint can overcome some reported limitations (lack of replication and access to the SQL database metadata information). Archives of such systems, can give rapid access to data more rapidly than backup and restoration of SQL databases.

• Instant messaging and web conference conversations

Instant messaging has moved beyond being a consumer-focused chat tool. In a recent survey, 20% of businesses indicated they needed to archive instant messaging now and another 28% said they would need to do so within 12 months. As web conferencing has become more widely used, they often contain business records that need to be preserved as well.

• Other data types

Any data that contains business records or communication can be called for in an e-discovery request. The data that are most difficult to produce are those that are not centrally stored. Personal Outlook .PST files are both a blessing and a curse in this regard. While they do relieve storage pressure on the email server, they are outside the easy access of the IT department. This is especially true when they are spread across a geographically dispersed area and employee’s homes. Further, .PST files are notorious for become corrupted.

So, What Happens If We Don’t Archive?

Could be, nothing. However if you take that attitude, you wouldn’t buy insurance, lock your doors or backup your data. Litigation involving issues that require the production of electronic evidence can affect organizations of any size. Both small and large companies have gone out of business due the costs of a law suit.

E-Discovery Can Become a Nightmare

Organizations with poor data retention policies can face severe consequences. Some examples:

• Qualcomm v. Broadcom 3:05-cv-01958, U.S. District Court for Southern California

This patent case illustrates that plaintiffs can lose of they fail to produce evidence in a timely manner. Qualcomm’s attorneys failed to hand over data including 200,000 pages of email and other correspondence until four months after the trial. The judge held that several Qualcomm patents should be rendered invalid. Qualcomm was ordered to pay all of Broadcom’s $10 million legal fees.

• Zubalake v. USB Warburg, 02-cv-1243, U.S. District Court for Southern District of New York

USB was required, at its own expense, to produce all electronic materials relevant to this sexual discrimination suit. During the e-discovery process, USB found that certain backup tapes were missing an that emails had been deleted. The court also found that USB had failed to comply with its own retention policies. USB was ordered to pay the plaintiff $29.3 million.

Legal Holds Are a Key Part of E-Discovery

If your organization is not able to place a complete or verifiable hold on data when required, you can encounter a variety of legal consequences, ranging from embarrassment to serious legal sanctions or heavy fines. Inability to produce evidence can be construed as evidence that a party to a legal action has something to hide. You cannot depend on employees to do this manually.

Backups Are Not An Archive

Making backups is best practices and must be used in case of a need to restore quickly after a hardware failure or some other disruptive event. However, they are not an effective archive solution. Two reasons:

• Answering an e-discovery request using backups can be extremely expensive and time-consuming. Further, backups can be overwritten and tapes are notorious for failure.
• Backups cannot preserver information created and destroyed between backups. This can lead to failure to comply with statutory retention obligation and legal requirements.

At the low cost of unlimited archiving available today, economics plays a back seat in the decision making process today. Electronic archiving of email, Instant Message logs and Bloomberg data is now routine. The last question in our series is whether to use a third-party email archive or use the built-in Exchange 2010 email archive? This is the topics of our next  post.

If you want more information, contact us via email or phone at 770-603-0300.

You back-up your email server regularly so, why add email archiving?  Besides, you are not in a “regulated” industry so you don’t need to archive, right? As the commercial says, “Humm, not exactly.”

First, let’s discuss why all organizations need to be consider electronic archiving. Then we’ll discuss the confusion of backups with archiving.

Purpose of Electronic Archives

Regulatory Obligations

It is no secret that some industries such as financial services, health care and energy are heavily regulated. What most don’t recognize (or acknowledge) is that all organizations have some level of compliance obligation for their business records (e.g., personnel records) that are sent by email. Some states are now requiring ALL organizations to archive their email. Other states are exploring such actions.

Legal Obligations

Email, IM and other electronic data are the “low-hanging fruit” for e-discovery requests. When a potential or actual case raises its ugly head, having an electronic archive can give an organization the change to review the data easily to see if there is any merit to the case. Decisions can be made early to settle or go to court. This is true regardless of which side of the law suit the organization is on.

Business Efficiency

Email storage is growing at more than 30% and 60% decision-makers cite this growth as their leading messaging management problem. A good 3^rd-party email archiving system will automatically archive email and relieve the email server of the storage burden. End-users can have a “folder” linking them to their archive.

A Backup Is Not an Archive

Backing up your data is best practice but, the purpose of performing a back-up is to be able to restore data after a disaster. If you try to use backup tapes for an archive you face several problems:

• Which tapes are needed and are they corrupt?

Backing up to tape was a great idea 30 years ago. However, as any tape monkey knows, you cannot rely on tapes all the time for adequate restoration. The older the tape is, the more likely the tape corruption. Judges sometimes interpret inability to retrieve data for incompetence; especially when better technology is available.

• Tapes can be large and are the data is not indexed.

Some compressed tapes can hold as much as 750GB of email data. That is over 50 million pages of text none of which is indexed. You have to find HDD space to restore the data, run an indexer on the data before you can run your query for: “all instances in which Hermione Alphschmiertz discussed the “Hammerfrazzle” project.” In other words, you have to restore your raw data and make it available for an archiving function.

• Recovery costs can be enormous.

Federal Rules of Civil Procedure mandate that companies keep data from Exchange servers, backup systems, offsite tapes and .PST files. In Petcou v.C. H. Robinson Worldwide, Inc., the costs of recovering 2 years of email for a single employee was more than $79,000. For more information on the high cost of recovery from tape, click here.

At the low cost of unlimited archiving available today, economics plays a back seat in the decision making process today. Electronic archiving of email, Instant Message logs and Bloomberg data is now routine. The only questions are: what data needs to be archived, what type of archive? and to use a third-party or use the built-in exchange 2010 email archive? These are the topics of our next two posts.

If you want more information, contact us via email or phone at 770-603-0300.

Box.net announces a collaboration application for Salesforce. Box.net for Salesforce CRM keeps relevant content at a sales team’s fingertips, enabling them to access any type of file, including contracts and agreements, product datasheets, competitive research, training materials and how-to videos, without ever having to leave Salesforce. Box.net for Salesforce CRM also allows users to share content with leads and customers by sending a link, as well as email, fax or edit files directly from Salesforce.

Box.net for Salesforce CRM is available immediately for Box customers on the Box Enterprise plan.

For more information or to set up a Free trial account, contact Blended Systems at 770-603-0300.

Box.net for Salesforce Demo Video

Get details on Secure Collaboration via Box.net.

Not a new concept

We all depend on some hosted solutions regularly and have for years. The Internet depends on a network of transport services out of both our premise and our control. Who knows where the all the routers and DNS servers are located? Who cares as long as they are available when we need them and they are secure. Yet, we use them as commonly as we use highways to drive to and from work.

SaaS is gaining acceptance

An April, 2009 survey of 850 enterprise users by McKinsey & Co. and the Sandhill Group shows that SaaS has moved into the mainstream. Respondents identified SaaS as the most important technology trend influencing their companies, with 74 percent of enterprise customers saying they are “favorably disposed to adopting SaaS platforms.”

A SaaS service is either a multi-tenant or single-tenant solution on a huge server farm in a secure and redundant location. Many websites run as a SaaS in a server farm the using organization does not own. Services such as Email Security are being accepted more readily than some others.

Example

A friend of mine selling storage solutions related this incident:

A customer had a need to use a high-powered server with over 500GB of storage and a SQL database for a data conversion project. The customer did not have an on-premise server available for the conversion. They could have put up a new server and add 500GB of additional LUNs to their existing SAN. Clearly an expensive solution to a temporary problem. After some checking, they contracted to rent a virtual server in Amazon’s SaaS Data Center. After 6 weeks, the conversion process was over and the customer no longer needed server. Total project cost? $1200.

Concerns

Yes but, trusting your data to some server farm “out there” takes a confidence in availability and security. As a SaaS VAR, we  hear this concern a lot.  “We like to keep everything in house.” Some are concerned over loss of control while others are concerned about data loss. While these are valid questions, a little investigation brings some light to the issues. You should be just as rigorous checking out a SaaS vendor as you are a vendor of an on-premise solution. In addition to the obvious, there are other questions you should ask a potential SaaS vendor. Read our: Ten Questions to ask your SaaS Provider for the list.

Two major reasons

A SaaS provider has bigger pipes, servers, storage and about anything else you can think of than all but the largest enterprises can afford. You pay for what you use; just like a utility bill. Most SaaS providers now offer a flat rate for their services giving you a known cost instead of a periodic large capitalization plus the ongoing administrative and upkeep costs.

We’re also seeing a healthy trend towards Going Green. The more services migrate out from the data center the lower your power and cooling bill. As long as the service provided is available and secure, does it really matter that it is in a rack in your data center? Sometimes, the answer is “Yes”.

Which services

On-Premises

Customized applications, legal requirements and political necessities are all reasons why some servers will stay in a data center. Keep them where they are; in your data center. You have servers doing a multitude of jobs? Keep them healthy.

SaaS

Need a new service? Renewing a subscription for a service? Need to add redundancy? Consider a SaaS version in the decision matrix. No hardware or software to capitalize, probably less administrative effort and a fixed price.

Our 1st principle holds true: Services are more important than Servers. It doesn’t matter where the service is as long as it is secure and available.

Agree? Disagree? Leave a comment.

Want to explore SaaS services? Call us at 770-603-0300 or email at bob@blendedsystems.com

New battleground – Web 2.0

Over 70% of all organizations have some sort of email security now. The thieves are looking for easier targets. Where? According to IDC and several other, 85% of all network attacks now come in via the browser. Normally safe websites often can be hijacked to propagate malware. The average hijacking lasts just 52 hours. Beyond that, according to Gardner, 37% of all information leaks come from web mail/postings. Facebook, Myspace and Bebo have become major distributors of malware.

“Yeah but, we’ve already got protection at the desktop!” As important as that is, web security needs to go go beyond just desktop protection. It must also be able to prevent data leakage, URL filtering, do audit logging and reporting. And oh, by the way, how about warning the user if the site they just found on a search is a bad site!

What’s available?

Firewall web proxies have been around for years. Some organizations use them, others not so much. However, now web security is available in the “cloud”.

“Yeah but, won’t it slow down the user’s browser?”

That’s what concerned us as we moved into the Web Security SaaS model. The answer depends on which vendor you are discussing. Webroot’s Web Security SaaS doesn’t impede browsers in the slightest.

So, we can get rid of our email security?

Not hardly. While spam has been mostly relegated to the “junk mail” category, there are still bad guys out there. The good news is that excellent email security SaaS is now available at “commodity” pricing.