E-mail and the Proxy

As someone with a long background in e-mail security (I was the postmaster and systems administrator for a very large semiconductor company), it always surprises me when someone asks for e-mail security features in a secure web gateway. It's not that these two devices aren't similar, they are very similar in the types of protection they offer, it's that I can't imagine why an IT administrator would want to possibly have their e-mail traffic impact their web traffic and vice-versa.

If you were a small organization, and you couldn't afford two separate devices you might be able to convince me that your argument for having an integrated device is sound, but in general even for small organizations I find it hard to rationalize the all-in-one device.

Organizations rely so heavily on both e-mail and the web for information and daily operations, that any interruption in one should not affect the other. If you use one system to secure e-mail, you shouldn't use the same to secure web. If for some reason there's a virus or malware outbreak (or a denial of service attack) that's using up the resources of your e-mail security device, you don't want that outbreak to slow down your web access and the same goes for a web attack.

The smart security move is to keep your e-mail security on separate devices from your web security.