Why Many SMBs Are Moving to Hosted Anti-spam
Are you using hosted anti-spam, or are you fighting the good fight alone? Spam is a constant challenge for email administrators. The amount of bandwidth required to address the spam problem is significant, and we’re not talking about circuit capacity when we say that. Admins must maintain anti-spam solutions, update lists, search for messages that may have been blocked, and answer dozens of user inquiries a day about why they received a particular spam email. With all the overhead associated with spam, it’s really no wonder why many SMBs are moving to hosted anti-spam.
One of the biggest reasons to move to a hosted anti-spam solution is its effectiveness. The hardware resources, multiple engines, and the ability to “learn” about new spam campaigns as they filter messages for hundreds or thousands of customer organizations each hour, enables them to handle huge loads quickly and efficiently, and to block new message types within moments.
Email admins can also get some relief as users can also do some of the work themselves. Hosted anti-spam service providers often include user self-service portals and individual summary emails. Each user can review the messages addressed to them that were blocked, and release any false-positives themselves. It’s faster for the user, and less busy work for the admin; everyone wins.
And speaking of relief, hosted anti-spam can provide some relief to your overused Internet connection. By filtering out all the junk before it comes into your network, you don’t waste bandwidth on moving messages that ultimately should be deleted. With over half of all incoming email being spam, that can add up to some serious savings on bandwidth utilization.
All that junk that should be deleted; of course it first has to sit in quarantine just in case it was a false positive. With hosted anti-spam, that quarantine is at your service provider so all that space quarantine needs comes from them, not you. Your already taxed servers don’t have to waste storage capacity on quarantine.
But for many SMBs, hosted anti-spam can be as much about the accounting as the technology. Anti-spam solutions can be expensive, what with the hardware, operating systems, applications, and licenses, not to mention the human hours required to set them up and maintain them. They become a major cost, that has to be budgeted and depreciated, and the ROI has to be justified over a period of months to years. Hosted anti-spam is a subscription service. There are no upfront costs; you pay a monthly per-user fee. If your user count goes up, you pay more, but if your user count goes down, you pay less. You pay only for what you need. Since it’s a monthly fee, you can treat it as an operational expense. Its ROI is practically immediate, and the labor costs associated with care and feeding of servers or appliances goes away. This is one time when the cheaper solution really is the better solution.
So now you know some of the great reasons why many SMBs are moving to hosted anti-spam. With all the advantages, both technical and fiscal, you owe it to yourself and your budget to evaluate hosted anti-spam too.
This guest post was provided by Casper Manes on behalf of GFI Software Ltd. GFI is a leading software developer that provides a single source for network administrators to address their network security, content security and messaging needs. Learn more about the benefits of using hosted anti-spam.
All product and company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.
Photo source: https://www.sxc.hu/photo/1215907.
