8,500 Billion Reasons Your Business Needs Spam Protection

New figures from security analysts estimate as many as 5 million computers are under the control of the top 10 botnets.  This includes the Cutwail botnet, which has been been blamed for as much as 29 percent of all spam during the 6 months between April and November of this year, or approximately 8,500 billion spam emails.

That’s 8,500,000,000,000 spam emails from one botnet, contributing to not even one third of the total spam for that 6 month period.  If your business needed one more reason to invest in spam prevention there is 8.5 trillion to choose from right there.

Where to Start?

Choosing from the variety of antispam systems available on the market can seem like a daunting task.  The best place to start is an analysis of your own needs.  Ask yourself these questions:

How many users do we need to protect? – Most antispam products are licensed per-user or per-mailbox that is being protected.  You need to know how many licenses you will need so that price comparisons can be made.

How many servers do we need to protect? – Some products are also licensed per-server, so it is important to know how many email servers are in your environment.  Depending on the antispam product it may be installed onto mail servers or it may reside on its own server.

How many locations do we need to protect? – For larger organizations with multiple entry points into the network for email a distributed antispam system might be required.  This will affect the choice of product as some are easier than others to administer in multi-server deployments.

Do we want to host this ourselves or outsource it? – Some businesses will require complete control of important systems like antispam while others will prefer to outsource spam protection so they don’t need to install and manage yet another server of their own.

Learning about Available Products

Once your basic needs have been determined it is time to find out what is available in the marketplace for antispam software.  You can use Google searches such as “email security” and “business antispam” to identify vendors and product names.

Research these products by looking up independent whitepapers and reviews to get an idea which products are liked and respected.

At this stage if your business uses an external IT consultant you can ask them which products they recommend to suit your particular needs.  You can also contact the security vendors directly to have their technical experts discuss the suitability of their products with you.

Performing an Evaluation

All evaluations should start with an isolated test in a lab environment before any products are tested in your production environment.  This will help identify any serious issues upfront before they can potentially cause problems for your real email servers.

Most products and hosted services will have 30 day trials available.  Take full advantage of these trial periods to do a thorough and consistent evaluation of each product against the same criteria.  Overall this process might take 2-3 months if several products are evaluated.

Measuring the Outcome

At the end of the evaluation a product will be chosen and deployed in the production environment.  It is important in this initial production stage to continue monitoring and measuring the effectiveness of the new antispam system.  Understanding such statistics as what percentage of total email is being blocked as spam, and how many false positives are occurring will allow successful implementations to be given full credit for positive outcomes.

And of course the best outcome is no longer receiving your share of those 8,500 billion spam emails.