E-mail security specialist SpamTitan announced the results of a “global industry survey of just over 500 users of e-mail security solutions,” suggesting “e-mail security threats such as spam, viruses, Trojans, phishing and malware are at the forefront of operational challenges facing [small and midsize businesses],” the company said in a news releas.e
According to the release, “The survey also shows that the SMB market acknowledges that an economic dip is the best time to make innovative IT investments.” SpamTitan suggested, “During this economic downturn, SMBs that have the foresight to make the right type of IT investments will have a better ability to gain a competitive edge and further differentiate themselves from the industry giants.”
Also according to the release, “Survey results showed that 75 percent of businesses indicated that they are actively seeking alternative e-mail security solutions-citing that they are looking for a better price/performance ratio. SpamTitan’s market analysis shows a key factor is that more SMBs are becoming information-driven businesses.”
SpamTitan President Ronan Kavanagh said, “Tight budgets and limited resources are driving companies’ efforts to increase ROI. It is becoming evident that client/server virtualization and cloud computing are becoming hot topics in the industry because they allow SMBs to achieve high performance while decreasing IT overhead costs and limitations such as bandwidth and resource constraints.”
Other recent reports such as e-mail marketing company Silverpop‘s 2008 survey “reported that 80 percent of e-mail recipients felt that spam levels were either about the same or getting worse. SpamTitan noted that ,ore than 50 percent of its respondents specified that their No. 1 note of contention with e-mail security solutions was an unsatisfactory rate of spam detection.” According to SpamTitan’s news release:
“The 2009 Email Security Risk Report from digital intelligence firm eMarketer … showed that the US was the leading spam-relaying country in the world with … 17.5% of the world’s total. SpamTitan’s market analysis expects to see a new generation of email security solutions that will meet the challenges of increased message traffic, fast-growing security threats and evolving global regulations. Additionally SpamTitan sees that virtualization is growing in adoption, especially because many SMBs have remote offices and value the capability of being able to facilitate security and redundancy across sites with instant scalability, failover and load balancing and eliminating the need for hardware costs. For example, in this survey 74% of SMBs reported that they hope that they can lower PC costs with alternative technologies such as desktop virtualization.“
Overall, security issues caused by e-mail scams like phishing remain a top concern for small businesses. SpamTitan noted, “If businesses experience a slow rate of [malware or spam] detection, it would make sense that spam would not decrease but actually seem to be getting worse.”