Deutsche Vermögensberatung (DVAG) in Frankfurt am Main is the world's largest independent financial sales organization. The company is the market leader in essential areas of the private old market. More than 37,000 asset advisors advise and support around 5.2 million customers. In the field of e-mail security, DVAG is using a hosted solution from Forcepoint ™. This makes the employees highly effective against spam and viruses. The solution turns threats out of the Web, even before they reach the computers and the network of Deutsche Vermögensberatung. The problem Open source spam filter did not meet expectations Like many other companies, the IT department of Deutsche Vermögensberatung in Frankfurt am Main has already installed anti-virus software and spam filters. While the virus protection worked perfectly, the spam filter to protect the emails remained behind the expectations. "A number of colleagues from all departments were still complaining about a myriad of spam mails," reports Dirk Käs, IT Services Dept. Director at Deutsche Vermögensberatung. "The detection rate of the initially used open source application was insufficient and at the same time we had to realize that the effort to maintain the filters was too high." The consequence could therefore only be that the IT department looks for a professional solution in the form of a managed e-mail security service. "To look after the fine-tuning of spam filters is, in our opinion, not one of the core competencies of the IT department," explains Dirk Käs. The solution Multiple protection against e-mail-based threats Käs and his team decided to carry out a pre-study with BlackSpider / SurfControl (in October 2007, Forcepoint SurfControl). In the first selection, the most important providers of hosted solutions came. The basis for the decision was a detailed list of criteria, in which BlackSpider met the requirements best. The framework for the pre-study: the software for 30 Lotus Notes mailboxes from IT staff had to prove their abilities over a period of three months. The test ran so successfully that after the conclusion the decision was made to implement the solution company-wide. Today the mailboxes of all employees of Deutsche Vermögensberatung are protected by Forcepoint Cloud Email Security - the current name for the services. This applies first and foremost to the approximately 800 internal staff members who use IBM Lotus Notes as a messaging system. In addition, there are more than 34,000 sales representatives. For e-mail communication, they use a Java application developed by Deutsche Vermögensberatung, which has been optimally adapted to the sales solution. All e-mail traffic is now running through the data centers of Forcepoint. Technically, the MX record (MX = Mail Exchange) had to be converted to the Forcepoint Datacenter. Today all incoming and outgoing e-mails are checked. The data centers have load-sharing capabilities and are designed as redundant high-availability clusters located at eleven geographically diverse locations around the world. To ensure a high degree of global and local security, data protection and confidentiality, all data centers are certified according to ISO / IEC 27001. Through service level agreements, ie service agreements, Forcepoint guarantees the availability of the services and provides emergency plans for uninterrupted operation. The latest findings from the Forcepoint Security Labs are continuously being integrated into the cloud security software. Here, more than 500 million e-mails are scanned per week and search for hidden security risks. In addition, the ThreatSeeker technology is used to analyze more than 600 million websites per week in order to identify known and new threat potentials. ThreatSeeker consists of a complex linking of mathematical algorithms, a profiling of the behavior patterns of attackers and a detailed analysis of malicious program codes. This is complemented by sophisticated data mining functions. The results of these security analyzes are automatically received in the form of real-time security updates in the hosted as well as in the security products used on-site. The result Centralized security for all employees The Deutsche Vermögensberatung uses two modules of the Cloud Email S