The internet brings a wide spectrum of benefits to the modern business. Connectivity has allowed the smallest firms to spread their message and products worldwide, creating unprecedented opportunity for just about anyone. The cloud revolution takes this connectivity to another level – serving businesses the tools they need to scale indefinitely and spread to a mobile workforce.
All of this of course, costs money. Every business will see opportunity in the connected world, but a smart business will leverage the internet in a cost effective manner. Unfortunately, there are forces working against every business – in fact every person, online. We see this malicious activity coming from many vectors, including the still infamous email spam.
This vector has evolved from its petty roots in unethical advertising – to viruses, malware, and identity theft through the ever-advancing tactic of spear phishing. Spam dominates the volume of email traveling through the internet. From our research at McAfee Labs, we see an average of 80% email coming through as spam. This is simply too much wasteful traffic for a business to process.
No business should have to deal with this traffic. Not only does it drain productivity for employees, but consumes internet bandwidth that has a hard cost associated to it. For many companies, email flow comprises the majority of their bandwidth, even more than web traffic itself. Smart business owners in the modern economy know they need to operate lean, and removing the unnecessary cost of unwanted email is an easy move. By leveraging the cloud, businesses can eliminate this email, along with its associated costs and productivity drains, before it even reaches their network.
According to IDC’s 2011 Cloud Security Survey, migration to the cloud for email security is increasing. The research firm found that “30% of enterprises currently use messaging security software as a service (SaaS), and another 23% say they are in the process of piloting or planning a messaging SaaS deployment in the next 12 months.”1 Businesses with extensive requirements for data control can also deploy a hybrid solution – leveraging on-premises hardware for comprehensive outbound messaging security, while still eliminating malicious email in the cloud.
Be proactive. Don’t let unnecessary costs hold you back. Let the cloud take the hit, not your business.
By Tim Roddy
