MessageLabs Announces Archiving Service to Meet Growing Compliance and Corporate Governance Requirements; Leader in Messaging Services Expands Product Line to Address Need for Secure and Easy to Implement Message Storage and Management.

NEW YORK & LONDON -- MessageLabs, the leading provider of messaging security and management services to businesses worldwide, today announced the availability of its MessageLabs Archiving Service, developed to meet the growing need for secure, hosted email and instant message (IM) archiving services for legal discovery, regulatory compliance and message storage management. With up to 83 percent of business-critical data now residing in email according to industry analyst Radicati, a growing number of companies face the need to securely maintain email archives in a searchable format.

"Email has evolved into a mission-critical application and companies must implement a management strategy around email that continues after employees hit the 'send' button," said Ben White, co-founder and CEO of MessageLabs. "With all of the legal risks associated with email today, we want to make sure the archiving process is not a complicated one, and believe the MessageLabs Archiving Service offers a secure and simple solution for ensuring long-term compliance and legal protection."

The MessageLabs Archiving Service removes the hurdles often associated with deploying and maintaining in-house solutions and is fully scalable to meet individual organizational needs. The service consists of five main components to ensure absolute security and reliability:

--Archiving Policy Engine - Accessible via a customizable web-based interface, businesses can specify and enforce acceptable policies related to use, retention and supervision. The policy engine also retains a full audit trail of changes.

--Secure Archive - Provides secure, encrypted data transfer and storage. Providing complete certainty and assurance for the client, all decryption ability is maintained by the individual customer only. The automated capture of all internal and external email communications also ensures the authenticity, and confidentiality of archived data. Digital fingerprinting verifies authenticity and a full trail of system and user activities are recorded for future audit purposes.

--Archive Search & Retrieval - Advanced search features meet even the most stringent discovery requirements and can be easily accessed through a mail client or a web-based archiving interface. The Search & Retrieval functionality enables real-time full text search across email header, subject, content and more than 250 attachment types. Search parameters can also be designated by a number of criteria (date, person, topics) and results can be easily exported and shared.

--Archiving Supervision - Organizations requiring complete visibility into policy compliance can implement a systematic process for reviewing content or implement a random sampling process. Risk assessment reports also provide a graphical view of exposure to potential risks due to non-compliance of set policies.

--Archiving Reports - Numerous reporting options help assess your organization's email patterns and behaviors. Reports can be generated by amount of email archived, supervision activities, size of secure archive or by an audit trail of changes.

"Enterprises have increased needs to keep their enterprise messaging systems continuously available -- for business continuity purposes, to meet compliance mandates and to support investigations. But companies don't want separate products for email, instant messaging and other protocols -- these just increase costs and make management more complicated," stated Andrew Jaquith, senior analyst with Yankee Group. "Of the nearly 60 percent of enterprises that have already deployed an instant messaging or email archiving product, one-third are re-evaluating their current solution."

MessageLabs Archiving Service is available now and is the newest addition to the company's complete range of 'in the cloud' managed services for email, web and IM to protect organizations from threats like viruses and spam. These services ensure the integrity of electronic communications and policy enforcement, thus helping businesses to manage and reduce risk while securing their critical infrastructure and business information. This managed service approach also allows organizations to manage their messaging without the burden or additional cost of traditional software or hardware solutions.

About MessageLabs

MessageLabs is the world's leading provider of messaging security and management services with more than 13,000 clients and offices in eight countries. For more information, please visit www.messagelabs.com.