|
Message from Taos CEO and Founder, Ric Urrutia,
and Co-Founder, Alexis Tatarsky
Spam, along with phishes, viruses, directory harvesting and the like has been part of an ongoing arms race between IT professionals and our email adversaries for a number of years now. The good news is that many of us now live a near spam-free existence, and it is finally possible for IT to at least provide our users the impression that we're winning the war. On the other hand, this is far from the experience of many users today. Providing a spam-free user experience is often one of the key differences between IT departments that are highly respected by their user communities, and those which aren't!
An ineffective spam solution is by far the most expensive choice one can make. Not only can deleting spam be a very significant time sink for users (estimates put the productivity impact of unchecked spam at about $1000/knowledge worker/year!), but spam can render devices like BlackBerries virtually worthless. Worse yet, accidentally missing legitimate messages among the spam (or having a high rate of false-positives in your spam solution) actually undermines the usefulness of email as a reliable tool at all. And delivering offensive mail can be a potential legal liability to the company.
There are four common categories of solution to unwanted email:
- Gateway Appliances
- Server-Software
- Desktop Software
- Managed Services
as well as hybrids and cocktails of these solutions. There are, of course, trade-offs to each approach, with some more appropriate to some organizations than others. For instance, outsourcing to a managed service means trusting them with access to all your email, while managing spam internally can be far more costly in terms of labor, storage and network bandwidth, while not benefiting from a specialist outsourcer's up-to-the-minute knowledge of the ever-changing tricks of the adversary.
In this issue of IT Intelligence we present an interview with Debra Martucci, Vice President of IT at Synopsys, a leading EDA Solutions and Services company with over 4,500 employees. Martucci took action against spam two years ago - and it hasn't been a problem at Synopsys ever since. Needless to say, she's a happy camper - and so are her users and her CFO. Her solution, after carefully weighing the alternatives, was to outsource most of the problem to Postini. It was a low-cost solution, but offered something else as well: a high degree of user control over sensitivity to different sorts of spam, and a simple web-based interface to administering those controls. By allowing the users a degree of control, when issues occasionally do come up the users look to IT as a resource to help them administer the filtering, rather than pointing fingers and demanding they do a better job. Both politically and technically, the Postini approach has worked exceptionally well for
Synopsys. And by the way, it costs them just $23/year/user! An independent study put the effectiveness of Postini at around 94%, with just 0.4% false positives.1
We're also pleased to share with you a short piece by Steve Kirsch, Founder and Chairman of Propel Software, based on a talk he did at Taos last month. Kirsch, a Silicon Valley icon who founded Infoseek and, before that, Frame Technology is preparing a novel Email Protection Gateway based on proprietary algorithms that appear to be very effective. Writes Steve, "While EPG isn't as effective [against spam] as getting rid of your email system all together, I sincerely believe it's as close as you can possibly get." We think it's certainly worth a look! It's a hybrid model, with software you run locally doing the filtering, but with each email message being checked against updated rules that reside at Propel.
Spam isn't a problem that is going to just disappear, but the weapons against it are doing a pretty good job of keeping pace with the spammers' ingenuity - if one carefully chooses tools appropriate to your organization.
Just what spam costs a company is now becoming more measurable. IDC, the market intelligence firm, has an interesting spam calculator (www.spamcalculator.com) which takes a sophisticated approach to measuring specifically what spam costs your particular organization. A much simpler free calculator is available at www.networkworld.com/spam/index.jsp.
If you haven't yet solved your spam problem, there's probably no better investment of your time than this! And if you'd like a partner in the analysis of your situation and selection and implementation of a solution, Taos would love to help you out. As always, you can contact me directly, at ric@taos.com, or at (408) 588-1200.
Sincerely,
Ric Urrutia
CEO & Founder
Alexis Tatarsky
Co-Founder
"delivering excellence in IT”
1"Test: Spam in the wild", By Joel Snyder, Network World, 09/15/03
|
 |
