Shielding your firm from electronic messaging scams

OLUYINKA ALAWODE
Every serious organisation needs to maintain privacy or security of its official electronic communication to all its stakeholders to avoid frauds. Odejide Orlando, chief executive of G4V, a business consulting, system integration and training firm explains how. Business

G4V is a business consulting and systems integration company in Nigeria and Ghana. We have Microsoft as partner and we do a lot of work with Microsoft. We found out that a lot of organisations who buy Microsoft products and solutions do not know exactly how to optimise them. So we have decided to start organising regular trainings. One of such solutions is Microsoft Exchange 2007. It is used for messaging in small, medium and large organisations.

Reasons
It is practically impossible for any organisation these days to run their business without an appropriate messaging and collaboration system. They need to be able to send emails securely to people within and outside the office, such as directors, staff, customers etc.

So, this Microsoft Exchange 2007 is a secured and reliable platform that allows one to do that. The organisation can catalogue all their emails, sort mail sizes, sort mail quotas within their website domain. Microsoft Exchange 2007 is probably the most used messaging platform round the world today. A lot of customers who have invested money and time in this solution are not optimising it. So G4V set up a training event primarily to teach the webmaster or administrators of organisations how to optimise this investment that they have made.

This Exchange 2007 is an upgrade to 2003. Nothing is stagnant and the needs of the clients are consistently changing. Everyday, they want more features, more capabilities within their platform.

With this solution, an organisation should be able to have 24 by seven, 365 days availability on their exchange server. The internal architecture of the solution allows it to filter mails, sieves mails and arranges them accordingly.

Targets
Every organisation, whether small, medium or large needs it. It may be a bank, Telecom Company, law firm, manufacturing, trading company or architecture firm. Any entity that has more than three people should have an up to date, appropriate messaging infrastructure that belongs to them, not just Yahoo, Google or Hotmails. These are supposed to be for personal use, not for official use. The messaging platform is really for an organisation so that they can maintain privacy, security of the official communication that go on within the organisation and amongst its stakeholders outside the organisation. For instance, my official mails should be sent with orlando@G4Vonline.

Messages are an organisational assets. Even when a staff is employed to disseminate certain messages, it is the organisation's responsibility. An organisation can be taken to court based on messages sent with their email address. How to ensure it is secured and done in compliance with company policy and industry standards, is what Microsoft Exchange 2007 does for an organisation. It will not allow outsiders to break into their emails. That way, no outsider will be able to use their web domain to send scam mails. Even if a staff of the organisation uses it to send scam or inappropriate mails, the solution has audit and traceability. So, the mail can be traced to the staff and the time it was sent.

Exchange 2007 works in conjunction with Microsoft Active Directory services to provide authorisation, authentication. So it would be impossible for another person to impersonate someone's identity on his mailbox. Apart from passwords, we can configure it with an identity management system that will recognise the thumbprint of the sender. So firms can ensure that whenever any one gains access to a mailbox, it is the owner of the mailbox. It will be completely impossible for anyone to impersonate another person on his e-mailbox.

We intend to bring people to our office monthly. We call it best practices with regards to enterprise system security, enterprise messaging system, identity and access management.