Infocrossing this week will announce iConnection 6.0, a suite of managed services that offer spam and virus protection plus encryption, archiving, disaster recovery and compliance services. The IT outsourcing company is enhancing its hosted e-mail security services with technology it acquired when it bought messaging management vendor IntelliReach in May.

These services can be used in conjunction with Infocrossing's hosted e-mail services, or an organization can manage its e-mail internally but have the mail stream run through Infocrossing's data center services on both the inbound and outbound ends, says Michael Wilczak, senior vice president of strategy and development with Infocrossing.

While iConnection competes with e-mail security offerings from Postini, MXLogic and Messagelabs that don't offer e-mail hosting, Infocrossing probably will find the most success selling its messaging security services to organizations that already outsource their e-mail, according to one analyst.

"When you look at what companies like Postini do, they're just touching the e-mail very briefly, and then it's all stored behind the company's firewall. There's a lot of discomfort with the idea of having the message store located somewhere else," says Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research.

For customers that have decided e-mail hosting makes the most sense, going with a service provider that layers security offerings on top is essential, he says. "Infocrossing starts off with base-level security and offers on top of that archiving, compliance and disaster recovery. It's a pretty complete system."   

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