Why is email security so critical?

Email is a vital communications channel for organizations of all kinds — from corporations to educational institutions and government agencies. As a result, email systems have become an even more important component of their information infrastructure. But with the significant growth of spam, viruses and other types of email-borne attacks in the past year, system managers are finding it more challenging to manage and protect this critical communications asset.

Costly Spam Attacks Are on the Rise
While email-borne viruses continue to be a problem, unsolicited commercial email, or spam, has become the fastest growing and most troublesome email security issue. In 2002, Postini™ documented a 150% increase in spam across our customer base. Out of the more than 9 billion messages we processed last year, more than 60% of those messages were identified as spam. Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs) — a technique spammers use to collect thousands of email addresses and then launch massive spam attacks, continue to fuel the growing volume of spam.

Junk Email is a Corporate Burden
Spam is more than just a nuisance. According to Ferris Research, "the total cost of spam to corporate organizations was $8.9 billion" in 2002. Many corporations report that they receive more junk email than legitimate email, causing corporate email users to loose the convenience factor electronic communications provides. Some experts even suggest that if corporations don't take more aggressive measures against spam now, email could become unusable by as early as 2004.

Unsolicited email creates many issues for the enterprise:

• Increased strain on the network and IT resources: Spam consumes labor resources, slows network traffic and clogs gigabytes of storage space.
• Decreased productivity and lost revenue: The process of managing email has become more cumbersome and time consuming due to spam, taking employees away from primary business activities and making it easy to miss important messages. In many companies, this can equate to lost revenue.
• Exposure to legal liabilities: Spam containing offensive content, such as pornography, that comes in to a company through the email system, can create a hostile work environment resulting in employee lawsuits — particularly if a company has not implemented an anti-spam solution.

For this reason, companies are seeking effective email security solutions that will help them reduce the costs and headaches associated with spam and other email system attacks — and help to keep email usable.