It has taken only four years for spam to become the bane of business but, as small and medium businesses (SMBs) are finding, spam can be killed before it enters inboxes with the use of a hosted provider.
Each working morning, hundreds of employees across Australia start their working morning with spam. Coffee in hand, they sit at their computers and sift through their inboxes, canning what Gartner predicts is 60 to 80 percent of all business e-mails.
One way to cut down on the number of hours staff must spend sorting through e-mail at the desktop is to outsource the management of spam at the server level.
Hosted anti-spam services are not only time-savers, they're surprisingly affordable. The price may change depending on enterprise size, or the specifics and level of service required, but for SMBs, the benefits of having someone else look after your spam are quite evident.
Since first being introduced to Australia by security provider MailGuard in 2001, the hosted anti-spam market has grown considerably. MailGuard sales and marketing director Andrew Johnson puts growth of anti-spam takeup for his company at 100 percent year-on-year for business use alone.
"Initially the take up was quite slow as it was a new concept in Australia. But then we started to pick up the SMBs who did not have enough resources in-house to handle growing amounts of spam," Johnson says.
IDC senior software analyst Megan Dahlgren says the rising take up of anti-spam software by companies has somewhat superceded the hosted market in recent years. However, she says hosted services are gaining traction with SMBs.
"Hosted anti-spam is still a small marketplace and there is very little market-sizing data out there on it. Many large organisations still want to manage their e-mail traffic on their own. But the hosted option is proving to be good for SMBs who are adding anti-spam to their hosted antivirus," Dahlgren says.
Security software provider Sophos' senior security analyst Sean Richmond agrees. He says in-house solutions are generally only used by those companies that have enough equipment and manpower to look after the updates and infrastructure required for looking after large amounts of spam.
"From an SMB point of view, a managed service is great because you don't have to know anything about how to look after or effectively use anti-spam software," Richmond says.
I think hosted anti-spam IS the answer. I use the Gmail solution: http://www.iopus.com/guides/gmail-spam-filter.htm