The Smoking Monkey

Talking about enterprise security for the sole purpose of keeping the “bad guys” out feels so old world. One thing that hit me in my first few weeks at Agari is the conversation around email security needs to shift.

Email security goes way beyond protection of people and data. It’s about fostering a strong brand! A strong, trusted brand is much more successful at building and growing community than an untrusted brand.

Fostering brand authenticity needs to be a core value of any trust model. Understanding this point dramatically changes how we architect email security solutions and what we consider a success. In a few weeks we’ll be sharing how Agari does this. Stay tuned.

The Smoking Monkey is back! But … this time with Sumo! After 1.5 years of working in the world of desktop virtualization, I am now back in the world of identity. This time ’round I’m focused on email!

So, why email? Well, email is the #1 most common form of online communication. It’s also a medium that impacts every facet of our lives — personal, business, social. However, the breadth of identity controls in this realm have been sub-par. As the folks at SmarterTools point out, the total number of searches on Google, Yahoo! and Bing combined equals just 1.1% of all email traffic, yet email has the lowest level of trust.

Over the past few years enterprises have invested in gateways and appliance to better secure internal infrastructure, but it’s only a beginning. Beyond securing the inbound and outbound flow of email there are many other problems  – how do I discover, secure and remediate all domains sending email on my behalf? How do I prevent malicious attack against my brand outside my domain? How do I protect brand reputation and  better leverage email to foster trust and build community?

These are the types of questions that Agari (the new company I joined) answer. How do we do it? Well . . . you’ll just have to wait a few more weeks until we officially launch and share the inner workings of our Email Trust Fabric and our partner / customer successes. In the meantime, check out our site, read our press release, and get ready for the world to change.