No small business wants its employees to be burdened with spam, and will do whatever it can to keep it from spreading malware through the organisation, phishing account credentials and affecting general productivity. GFI Software’s Jeff Orloff explains how new anti-spamming solutions in the cloud can help tighten up small businesses, even when building at scale and speed.
Why consider cloud anti-spam?
Jeff Orloff, GFI Software
There are various types of anti-spam solutions out there, such as appliance, software, and hosted solutions, which have been called upon by small to medium-sized organisations to fight spam with great success. Choosing one over the other often comes down to management decision based factors other than performance. In this article, we are going to focus on what a cloud-based anti-spam solution can provide for your organisation:
1. Efficiency
As IT professionals, we never question RAID for hard drives, multiple power supplies on mission critical computers and servers or multiple NICs. Why should we treat security, and spam in particular, any differently? Using a cloud anti-spam solution you do not run the risk of leaving your email unprotected should a server or other piece of the infrastructure puzzle fail.
2. Scalability
One of the selling points of on-premises solutions is the ability to scale to the needs of your organisation. Cloud anti-spam is no different. If your organisation grows overnight, your mail can be easily protected.
3. Compatibility
Regardless of the operating system your mail servers run or the clients your users have installed on their desktops, a good cloud anti-spam solution will work. There are no compatibility issues for organisations with multiple platforms and no concerns about having to migrate to compatible servers and desktops.
4. Customisation
Good cloud anti-spam solutions allow email administrators to give users as much control as they want over their junk folders. Without having to rely on the IT department to check for false positives, users will not only feel empowered but important emails that were sent to the mail quarantine will not be missed. Users can also be provided with a summary of messages flagged as spam, or suspected spam, so that they can easily identify anything that should have made it through the filters.
5. Money and Time Savings
We have all heard the pitch when it comes to cloud solutions. You save the money you would have spent on hardware, software, operating system costs, maintenance, configurations, management, and so on. Of course, cloud anti-spam offers these savings as well. And since a good cloud-based anti-spam solution also has the ability to put power in the users’ hands, it saves the IT department time that they would have had to spend addressing false positives and queries run to search for important missed messages.
Both on-premise and cloud anti-spam solutions can offer you the latest technologies available to fight against the growing threat of spam. Whether you are managing a small business with a single site or a larger sized organisation with multiple offices, choosing between the two types of anti-spam solutions can prove to be a tricky decision, so doing your research and assessing which option best fits your organisational needs and goals is important to choose the right option for your company.