All businesses face a daily bombardment of email spam that consumes valuable IT staff
time as well as end-user productivity. In addition, email is an attack vector for many
types of security threats to businesses, including phishing, viruses, spyware, and
malicious URLs. Given that all businesses are experiencing the financial pressures of a
tightening world economy, coupled with the uncertainty of any near-term recovery, small
and medium-sized business (SMB) managers are searching for ways to cut costs while
continuing to maintain a consistent level of service and protection for their businesses.
W H I T E P AP E R T h e B u s i n e s s B e n e f i t s o f H o s t e d E m a i l S e c u r i t y f o r t h e S M B Sponsored by: Trend Micro Brian E. Burke Gerry Pintal Christian A. Christiansen December 2008 m I D C O P I N I O N oc.c All businesses face a daily bombardment of email spam that consumes valuable IT staff di.w time as well as end-user productivity. In addition, email is an attack vector for many ww types of security threats to businesses, including phishing, viruses, spyware, and 5 malicious URLs. Given that all businesses are experiencing the financial pressures of a 104. tightening world economy, coupled with the uncertainty of any near-term recovery, small 539 and medium-sized business (SMB) managers are searching for ways to cut costs while .80 continuing to maintain a consistent level of service and protection for their businesses. 5.F SMBs face unique challenges in combating these threats, in that they have very 002 limited IT staff resources available when compared with larger businesses. Because 8.27 SMBs are confronted with having to deal with other critical issues on a daily basis, the 8.8 frequent maintenance required by IT staff to keep messaging security products 05. effective can very often be neglected, resulting in an increased exposure to malicious P security threats. In contrast, large enterprises are able to establish, fund, and staff ASU security-specific groups whose charters are directed at architecting, managing, and 10 maintaining secure corporate infrastructures. 710 A SMBs, by necessity, focus the lion's share of their financial and people resources on M , funding, managing, growing, and competing for market share in their respective mah industries. Consequently, the resources available to implement, maintain, and manage gni security infrastructures are, in many cases, in short supply. As a result, information mar security among SMBs is primarily approached reactively rather than proactively, and F te critical tasks such as ongoing maintenance of messaging security products can often go ert by the wayside. S neep IDC believes that it is imperative for SMBs to seek security solutions that proactively S 5 address not only the emerging threat environment but also their operational cost and :sr maintenance issues. etrauq For SMBs looking to address these critical issues, hosted messaging services have dae become an attractive platform of choice for their messaging security approach. Driven by H la the explosive increase in the volume of spam and the increasing sophistication of bol malicious attacks, hosted messaging security services are quickly being adopted by many G organizations that want to stop threats "in the cloud" before they reach the network.
IDC estimates that in excess of 95% of unwanted messaging traffic can be stopped in the cloud before it enters the corporate network. IDC predicts that by 2012, hosted messaging security services will overtake both software and appliances as the most widely deployed new SMB messaging security platform.
Hosted messaging security services are becoming an attractive platform because they stop threats before they reach the network and ongoing upgrades and tuning are conducted by the vendor, providing up-to-date protection against the latest known and unknown threats. Hosted email security is also more cost-effective for SMBs due to the additional support provided by the vendor. Having an experienced security vendor provide the support saves on IT resources as well as reduces the risk of costly security breaches. Overall a hosted email security solution offers higher cost savings over other SMB email security approaches.
M E T H O D O L O G Y
To gain insights into the emerging security challenges and costs facing SMBs and to learn more about how organizations address these challenges, IDC conducted in-depth interviews with executives at companies in several industry sectors to identify SMB customer and market trends for hosted software as a service (SaaS) solutions. The participating organizations operate in education, manufacturing, food services, and security services industries. In addition, IDC met with Trend Micro's management team to review its goals and strategies for addressing cus... [download for more]
