Controlling Spam Growth
Recent Spam and Virus Trends.
Spam volumes dipped in July 2010 with a 13% drop compared to June 2010, but spam volumes continue to remain very high, and Postini predicts spam will increase in volume through the remainder of the year.
Virus traffic, meanwhile, spiked 200% in July over June 2010. This spike contributed to an increase of 260% in Q2’10 viruses over Q2’09.
For more information on spam and virus volumes, see the Postini report on Recent Spam Trends.
- More than 90% of all email is spam according to Postini data centers.
- Postini blocks 1 billion messages and 2 terabytes of spam every day.
- Spam grew 280% from January to May in 2009.
- Spam cost $140 billion globally in 2008 due to lost productivity and cost of fighting spam. (Ferris Research)
- Image and other attachment spam made up more than 30% of all junk messages in 2007 and is recently back in vogue with spammers. This drives an increase in bandwidth, processing and storage requirements.
Capacity planning is difficult.
- To avoid slowdowns or downtime, you must purchase enough capacity for the largest spike in spam volume plus some headroom. Then when spam fluctuates down you are effectively paying for unnecessary capacity.
- Forecasting future spam levels is a headache and near impossible task as we have no idea what the spammers are planning in the future.
Advantages of using Google’s cloud-based solution:
- Lower overall costs
- More predictable costs
- IT staff can be freed up for other initiatives
- Very high levels of detection and remediation
- Very high reliability
- Security and privacy can be better in the cloud
- Deployment is usually much faster
- Power savings
- Flexible access options
