Get to know more about UpStream
What is UpStream, exactly?
UpStream is Tangent’s Email Filtering service, providing both inbound and, optionally, outbound email filtering to protect organizations of all sizes from both common and uncommon email-borne nuisances and attacks.
Ranging from omnipresent spam and common phishing attacks to even sophisticated spearphishing and Zero-Day threats, UpStream’s conglomeration of protective technologies shield your users from those seeking to use email as a weapon.
How long has UpStream been around?
Tangent has been in the email filtering business since the late 1990s, defending businesses from the earliest iterations of spam and virus-laden emails. As more and more organizations use email and the Internet to power core functions of their businesses, the proliferation of threats have increased commensurately.
Tangent is keeping pace with them with our continually honed email filtering systems, recently completing a technological overhaul and rebranding that better reflects our position as being an “upstream” protector of your organization.
From a service provider standpoint, what kind of resources does UpStream have?
Physical resources include SOC-2 and SSAE-16 certified datacenter environments with redundant power, cooling and high bandwidth ISP uplinks which are then secured by biometric access control, mantraps and armed sentries.
Electronic security measures include whitelist-only network administrative access to host servers, multifactor authentication, end to end TLS-encrypted communication and more.
Dynamic Link Scanning (Link Lock) has a multiple Amazon Web Services (AWS) region spread with additional availability zones slated for each.
How is UpStream priced?
UpStream’s inbound filtering pricing is defined by the quantity of users. We have flat rate pricing of 75 cents per user per month, equating to about $9 a year. User quantity is determined by the number of unique email addresses that are having email sent inbound towards them.
Outbound filtering is a separate service which can operate independently of inbound filtering, but is often used in conjunction with standard inbound filtering. It likewise operates by the same individual user counts, but at less than 60 cents per user per month or about $6.75 per year.
What steps are necessary to begin using UpStream? Can Support help me with this?
Tangent understands that major DNS changes, such as that of a mail flow, can be daunting and are rare enough to not be considered common knowledge by even experienced Network Administrators. To that end, our Technical Support team is ready to roll with both documentation and live screen-sharing support to help get you going both smoothly and stress-free.
For those who already live and breathe the Domain Name System (DNS), the below steps are all that are needed for basic initiation of filtering:
For Inbound Filtering, change your organization’s Mail Exchange (MX) DNS records to point towards an UpStream service cluster.
Recipient Verification is highly recommended to have configured on the mail server to limit the number of potential out-of-service email addresses that can have their mail filtered. This greatly cuts down on how much filtering UpStream does for your organization, and consequently, reduces the price of the service.
For Outbound Filtering, add the UpStream service cluster’s IP addresses to your Sender Policy Framework (SPF) DNS record, then configure a Smart Host path on the mail server for emails originating from your organization to route to UpStream.
What is outbound email filtering? Why is it used?
Outbound filtering, in a nutshell, is having your organization’s emails that are sent to other organizations run through the same scans and checks that inbound email filters do.
Outbound email filtering is not a new concept in the world of filtering, but is growing in prominence due to the advent of Supply Chain Attacks and Business Email Compromise. When a user at your organization email account gets compromised, it’s only a matter of time before it starts being used as an attack vector to steal data internally, compromise other internal users and perhaps worst of all, attack your clients and vendors by banking on your organization’s reputation as a trusted contact of theirs.
Outbound email filtering can prevent the horrendous damage that these client and vendor attacks can do, especially to the reputation of the organization.
How does UpStream stack up against other email filtering services like Barracuda, MimeCast or ProofPoint?
Amazingly well, both in terms of technology and price.
UpStream is built upon SpamTitan’s technology, which aggregates the ClamAV, BitDefender and SpamAssassin technologies that most of the big names also rely on, in whole or in part for their own platforms, to provide the same high quality of defensiveness they do but at a drastically lower price point (in most cases, up to 75% less).
Combine this with Tangent’s decades of customization, fine tuning, managed email filtering service experience and extraordinarily dedicated Technical Support team and you’ll be hard pressed to find a stronger value proposition for your email filtering needs.