MessageLabs is the worldwide market leader in email security services and, over the last year, has added Web and IM filtering, as well as archiving to its offering, recalled Alex Shipp, who sports the sonorous title of imagineer at the Gloucester, UK-based company.
While the current phase is one of consolidation and getting better at everything we do, Shipp acknowledged that further into the future we want to be a one-stop shop for all our customers’ messaging service requirements, including for things like VoIP.
The rationale is an obvious one, in that VoIP makes voice just another app on a network, albeit one with real-time characteristics, and as such scannable by the same technology MessageLabs uses for other apps today, provided it can be made to address the protocols VoIP uses. Indeed, in as much as email, IM and Web have now all been brought onto a single scanning engine at the company’s data centers, the potential to address new protocols would appear to be considerable.
MessageLabs will probably only get around to thinking about VoIP scanning and archiving a year from now, however, and in the meantime there are smaller projects underway, Shipp revealed. Its privacy services presently involve boundary-to-boundary encryption using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol, but we want to go user-to-user too, he explained, adding that that would require a different approach, Shipp admitting that we haven’t worked out what to use yet, the big sticking point being key management.
In other words, should we encrypt with our keys as well as the end users’, or should we allow them to encrypt without our keys? The latter would, of course, mean that no scanning could be carried out on such traffic, and if that is the option pursued, it will assume that user-to-user encryption will be a high-end service only for people like board members and senior officers of a company, who presumably will be in a position to trust their email interlocutors to the point where they will trade ultimate system security for greater privacy.
Another subject in Shipp’s mind, and something MessageLabs will decide on during this quarter, is the development of a cutdown, vanilla service portfolio alongside its full-featured ones. The attraction of such an idea is clearly to broaden the addressable market, since any such service will be priced at the entry level and so should appeal to a wider potential user base.
The challenges, however, are significant ones, in terms of brand image, since it will implicitly be a less stringent service, and indeed of go-to-market, as MessageLabs might need to develop a new channel to reach this new potential customer base. If it does go for such a development, the technology won’t be complex, essentially requiring no more than turning some things off, Shipp acknowledged, and for a route to market, it could possibly leverage partners it already has, such as BT and IBM.
