Messaging Architects announced the availability of version 2008.2 of its M+Guardian Secure Messaging Firewall. Now available as a fully virtualized appliance, called M+Guardian VMF, it delivers advanced email security and data loss prevention combined with the business benefits of server virtualization. M+Guardian VMF integrates seamlessly with other components of the M+ platform such as M+Archive, ensuring fully compliant email lifecycle management.

With this release, Messaging Architects enables organizations to fully leverage the business continuity and high availability features linked to server virtualization and apply them to their messaging and collaboration infrastructure. "M+Guardian VMF reflects Messaging Architects' commitment to delivering best-of-breed technology that can simplify the lives of its clients. We saw the advantages that ESX, the industry's leading enterprise virtual platform, and the freely available VMware Server can bring to our customers and wanted to ensure they could benefit from these advantages when deploying M+Guardian," explains Nick Stefan, VP of R&D at Messaging Architects. M+Guardian VMF is delivered using VMware's industry leading virtualization platform for which Messaging Architects is a certified VMware Technology Partner.

"The convenience of email as a business communications tool also exposes enterprises to a wide variety of legal, financial and regulatory risks associated with outbound email. M+Guardian truly delivers a significant benefit for our customers in addressing these risks from a policy-based, identity-driven perspective," says Maximilian Morgan, Product Manager for M+Guardian. "Other solutions typically only address one or two security risks, and fail to offer a unified view of the organization's mail flow, resulting in important compliance and security gaps".

M+Guardian incorporates a robust, enterprise-class clustered MTA with perimeter security, anti-virus and anti-spam technologies, reputation and content filtering engines, data privacy and loss prevention. The built-in clustering capabilities of M+Guardian ensure that no latency is introduced into the mail flow, even when sophisticated pattern matching and filtering is applied on a large volume of messages. Before any new version is shipped, M+Guardian is extensively field-tested on Messaging Architects' own real-life, high-volume hosted email system. This system (www.myrealbox.com) processes over 6.5 million messages a day for 50,000 users worldwide, filtering out 99.1% of all messages.

"The M+Guardian appliance really meets the needs of our Colleges with its flexibility and numerous features. What I really like about this version is the fact that it comes as a pre-configured and optimized appliance that requires minimal setup on my part. The fact that it uses its own embedded LDAP server is a huge selling point for me as it allows me to manage profiles and policies centrally. M+Guardian also scales really well and is able to easily handle all the traffic for both College email systems," remarks John McHugh, Network System Specialist at The Chabot-Las Positas Community College District, where M+Guardian protects the email accounts of 1,500 faculty and staff users and some 22,000 students, ensuring full compliance with internal policies and external regulatory frameworks.

The new fast-track deployment wizard simplifies implementation and provides instant portability of server settings to new server hardware, whether physical or virtual. Installation of M+Guardian will typically take less than 15 minutes from opening the box to full Email Server protection.