ExchangeDefender Supernet
Last month we announced a major upgrade and expansion of our network to better serve our clients in a more challenging cybersecurity world. I’m sure you’ve seen many stories in the news about cyber attacks and how some groups and nations are expected to attack our critical infrastructure.
We can assure you that those threats are real and are ongoing in a very focused fashion. In order to prepare for a more massive attack, we’ve had to rely on some BGP routing magic to make ExchangeDefender far more resilient.
Make sure you allow inbound SMTP traffic from ExchangeDefender’s 65.99.255.0/24 (255.255.255.0) range.
This range has been in use by ExchangeDefender since 2003 so if you’ve followed our deployment guide correctly you should be all set. If you’ve chosen to deploy ExchangeDefender differently and have other scanning/security active on that range, you might see email delivery delays and failures. Easy fix, just add the whole class C.
What is happening under the hood is that all of our different data centers are routing traffic via the same 65.99.255.x range. Even if half of our data centers disappear due to a telecom or power event, we will be able to continue email delivery.
As you’ve seen over the past year, we’ve focused on Inbox, LiveArchive, and upcoming Replay features to improve security and reliability. Like you, we wake up every day to another Exchange/Gmail event/issue/policy/fubar and nobody likes losing email or the ability to communicate. This is why having ExchangeDefender around your email infrastructure is critical if email is critical to your organization. The new supernet has been routing messages for over a month with no issue and on Wednesday, May 15th we will make it available for everyone.
Network Upgrades at ExchangeDefender
Many IT professionals have gone through a lifecycle infrastructure upgrade – the all important cycle of improving the infrastructure as the vendors push down new features with ever increasing resource demands. We’ve been doing that since 1997. One thing that has changed in the past 20 years is the scope and magnitude of both attacks and the network demands to manage them all. We’ve done an excellent job keeping up with them all, with our last major outage (that lasted nearly 4 hours) back in 2011. We learned a lot that day – and rolled it up into our products and services that many of our partners have experienced. These days, with the cloud services, the game is completely different.
I hope you have a moment to join our WEBINAR next Thursday, April 11th, at noon
Register here: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5700720797827651073
It won’t be the usual rah-rah new features new stuff show. I will speak candidly about how we’ve managed to overcome and triumph in the “Cyber” security game and how we’re still always one step behind whatever 0-day attack vector comes down. I’ll be discussing (somewhat intimate) details about the performance issues, DNS issues, DC issues, subscription issues, 3rd party IP issues, and how all of these have become both an IT management issue and customer service nightmare. I truly hope you join us. I know your time is valuable and schedules get tight so if you can’t make it, the recording will be posted in our portal as usual.
What we learned last week – for the millionth time – is that communication in cases of issues is paramount. When things appear to go down, people panic. They require not just information but reassurance, confidence, and a plan required to address issues. For smaller companies, that’s a matter of just falling back to a cell phone – for larger ones (if it’s not already you, it definitely is something to consider for your clients) that is simply not an option and the volume of activity will easily and quickly overwhelm you. I used to see it every day – when issues come up for our partners, their clients call us.
We’ve made an overwhelming investment – not just in technology and features but manpower – that has fueled our growth for the last few years. I want to share, personally, exactly how we operate and how we’ve been able to both prioritize and execute some of the more impressive infrastructure enhancements and how they are going to be here to serve you for years when something happens.
And then I hope to offer you the same – as a token of our appreciation for your business and your loyalty through the years. Pretty excited, I hope you can join us.
Sincerely,
Vlad Mazek
CEO
ExchangeDefender