SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Concentric today announced the expansion of the company’s messaging, collaboration, DNS, and hosting services for small to medium businesses with Perimeter Email Protection (PEP). The service provides email security, email filtering, and delivery back-up for businesses that own and manage on-premise email servers. By leveraging PEP, businesses can increase network security and protect existing email investments without expensive infrastructure enhancements.

Perimeter Email Protection is a complete suite of email server security applications that includes tools to filter and authenticate incoming email before it reaches the customer’s email infrastructure. By stopping spam and email based attacks at the perimeter, PEP can reduce email load and spam by 90 percent or more. PEP prevents spam, viruses, directory harvesting, denial of service or dictionary attacks, fraud, phishing schemes, and other debilitating email bombs or attacks from reaching the corporate email server. PEP and PEP Filtering ensures that only clean, valid and properly addressed email is sent to company email servers for final delivery.

“We are very pleased with the enthusiastic response we are getting from our PEP customers. With email based attacks and spam on the rise, businesses should look at a cost-effective perimeter solution like PEP, rather than costly upgrades to their email server infrastructure. The new PEP Filtering and Premium Junk Mail Filters enhancements have been well received and provide an end-to-end solution that is easy-to-use and extends the life of existing investments,” said Barbara Branaman, president of Concentric.

“Concentric PEP has served flawlessly as our frontline of defense in blocking DOS attacks and eliminating the high ‘bogus’ user email volumes we were experiencing. We have over 300 email user accounts, and when we enabled PEP we immediately saw a drop from over 60,000 emails a day to less than 8,000 a day. Our mail server is back to running fast and efficiently. Since our business includes online retail sales, we cannot afford to loose even one customer email communication. With PEP we have the peace of mind that all our emails will be stored if our email server goes down,” said Don Winant, Gristedes’ CIO.

XO Communications Inc. (OTC: XOHO)