Now I don’t actually use my personal Hotmail account anymore however, on the odd occasion that I do log in, I find 200 emails – all spam. What’s more, I get emails that are seemingly from friends but in actual fact are spam – I hear it’s from something called spoofing.
Now to be fair, the last time I looked, there were no 'keep mail
out' options, but having a look today, Microsoft have released
something called SmartScreen which acts behind the scenes as a spam
filter. They say it's what 'businesses and government
agencies use'. I clicked on the sign up now and it took me to
my inbox so being a typical IT user, I clicked on the sign up
button again and got redirected to my inbox again. So I
assume I already have SmartScreen in which case, I'm still not
having much luck. So what is the answer - not using a public
cloud email solution!
An article I was reading suggests that around 120 billion spam
messages are sent every day. These emails clog up the
internet, disrupt email delivery, reduce business productivity,
raise internet access fees, irritate recipients and erode people's
confidence in using email. Considering then that 90 to 95% of
all email is spam, the negative effects of spam are costing New
Zealand business in numerous ways. The article, "The True
Cost of Spam" outlines some of these as:
- Lost Productivity: spending just 10 minutes a day dealing
with spam will cost you almost a full week of lost productivity
every year (not to mention downtime caused by crashed computers or
servers attacked by viruses or Trojans). Multiply this by the
number of staff and soon it's the equivalent to shutting business
for a month or two a year!
- Wasted IT Resource: as a frequent source of viruses and
trojans, using up your disk space, backup space and bandwidth.
- Rising ISP costs: because of the online obstructions and email
delivery disruptions that spam causes, it adds significantly to
your ISP's costs - costs that they inevitably pass on to you, the
customer.
- Problems for mobile users: for people who retrieve their
email on the road, if spam is not blocked at server level, it makes
it's way to an individual's blackberry, iPhone, smartphone or
PDA. Most mobile packages charge for all incoming messages,
so you are paying for every spam message that makes it's way to
your hand-held device, whether you open it or not. (and you run the
risk of reaching your datacap).
The article outlined some research done to establish a financial
figure that Spam costs a business. 12 PCs and 10 mobile
users, on average, received 8000 emails per day with 90% being
spam. Of these, 80% were being stopped by the companies
filtering software. Around 43,000 emails, that were getting
through to the user's mail client, were spam! Of those spam message
that made it through, some were malicious attachments. So the cost
to this business?
- one hour a month to contract an outsourced IT company to deal
with spam or related issues
- approx. 2300MB of storage space on their server of unwanted
emails
- 400 MB per user per month of mobile data used to forward
unwanted incoming spam
- Around $18,000 per year! Roughly $1,500 per
employee!!!
So what do you do to ensure your business isn't losing this kind
of money? With cloud being the new buzz word but public cloud
not yet breeding enough confidence around security and protection,
your option is to look at a provider who has an infrastructure that
incorporates firewalls, system spam filters and end user spam
filters. This means you have all the benefits an enterprise
infrastructure has to give without the nuisance and work involved
with maintaining and managing this infrastructure. The
benefits of moving your exchange to a hosting provider are
numerous. To name a few:
- Reduce business risk as no on-site server needed
- Reduce cost as no on-site server needed
- Reduce monthly maintenance and call out costs as no on-site
server needed
- Secure Access from anywhere there is an internet
connection
- Reliable, scalable and cost effective
Why go through all the pain and hassle of ensuring your in-house
exchange server is protected from the big bad world of spam when
you can outsource it and reduce your costs.
If you would like more information around MHA's hosted exchange
product, please do not hesitate in contacting the Sales department
on 09 363 8888.