Over the past five years, the amount of spam being delivered to email servers around the world has increased dramatically; currently over 90 percent of emails delivered worldwide are spam emails. This means that whilst you may be able to effectively filter emails in house, it will require increasing resources, to manage and maintain.
Consider this; your enterprise receives 20,000 emails per day. That’s 18,000 emails that must be analysed and inspected by your anti-spam software each day; then another system must scan each email and its attachments to ensure that they do not contain malicious software. At this point, an organisation should start to think about implementing a gateway type anti-spam server on separate hardware to deal with this burden.
Whilst there is nothing wrong with this type of solution, it has its limitations. First, it’s another piece of hardware to run, cool and keep secure – the server must be licensed and up to date at all times. It also must be monitored and kept under warranty. All of these costs can be avoided by moving to services that filter and deliver email in the cloud.
Moving these services into the cloud can also have other benefits. In addition to those previously mentioned, cloud anti-spam services can often filter emails with a higher accuracy than internal anti-spam systems.
This is due to cloud-based systems learning from the sheer volume of mail passing through them; allowing them to provide more accurate filtering. This can be tweaked even further by industry specific filtering, ensuring no emails are falsely blocked.
Whilst this approach can save you money, how can you ensure that the systems are available at all times? Moving this service into the cloud increases availability as the services split between many physical servers in the cloud. In addition to the large amount of redundant hardware, you also have excellent connectivity to the anti-spam services which should in theory, be available 24/7.
Whilst your anti-spam servers may be able to scan infected emails with updates released several times a day, cloud based solutions provide zero day exploit protection, meaning as soon as a new virus is detected, the system is able to detect and remove it.
The Internet Group’s new cloud anti-spam solution helps to protect inbound and outbound businesses e-mail from spam, viruses, phishing scams, and e-mail policy violations.
In summary, the benefits of this solution over other anti-spam solutions are clear:
* A multi-layered, real-time anti-spam protection
* The elimination of threats before they reach the corporate firewall
* Assistance with policy enforcement and compliance requirements
* The ability to keep unwanted email from reaching corporate networks, using active directory synchronisation
