Cisco Ironport as an email gateway solution or other solution

[uzochikwa]

Hello All,
Please can anyone advice whether ironport is suitable as an email gateway solution requirements for handling secure e-mail or if there isn't some other cisco solution? These are the requirements that I can see:

a) Send and receive e-mails using SMTP to both the Internet and via client closed network.
b) Store emails in a secure structure supported by encryption.
c) Offer access to the collection of stored e-mails by means of POP3, including e.g inter alia, collection from Biztalk.
d) Store e-mails in various mailboxes that can be accessed with username and password that comply with requirements for security.
e) Configure and maintain anti-spam as well as anti-malware tools.

f) It must be a redundant solution that is located in the Clients data centers and that supports a minimum of 15,000 emails to and from the solution on a daily basis.

[Ken Stieers · Accepted solution]

1. This is the base functionality of the ESA or ESAv are based on, it's a very fast, capable mail transfer appliance
2. I'm honestly not sure if mail in the work queue is encrypted on disk or not...
3. ESA is NOT a mail server/storage appliance. It takes mail in, scans it per policy, sends it on.
4. Again, not a mailbox server.
5. This is part of the ESAs functionality.
6. Redundancy and flow is handled by deploying multiple ESAs and using network based facilities to handle failover (DNS, Email servers that can send to multiple smart hosts, load balancers) Since the ESA is not storing mail, there isn't any facility for replicating mail. ESAs can share a common policy and security configuration. The docs call this "clustering", which is a really bad name for "configuration replication".
ESA is a security gateway...not an email server... you need to look at Exchange, or one of the open source mail servers like iRedMail, Apache James, or Dovecot.

[uzochikwa · Accepted solution]

Hi Ken,

Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation on the requirements points. Based on this, what solution would you advice would cover all these requirement points? What would you suggest?

[Ken Stieers · Accepted solution]

On prem?
Dovecot or MS exchange, and ESAs... you're not going to find this in one product.

[uzochikwa]

Hi Ken,

Thanks for the reply. Yes, On prem. What about for the cloud? Any differences with the solution?