Implementing a solution that will provide some type of defence against SPAM and viruses will prove extremely beneficial to any messaging system. This type of solution is almost a core component to implementing additional features and functionality. Equally important to implementing a solution for anti-SPAM and anti-virus is managing the solution and understanding technology changes within the industry. Newer technology is available that may be more cost-effective and provide a tighter security layer over the messaging system. In these cases, organizations may want to consider reviewing new products on the market today, as there have been many advances in this area since their first-generation counterparts. These advances in technology have been necessary based on the trends that spam and viruses have taken over the past year.

In the recent past email viruses rose to an unprecedented high where 1 in 16 emails contained a virus. SPAM also saw a huge jump in numbers as it now accounts for almost 73 percent of all Internet email. This figure almost doubled since the year 2003 where SPAM accounted for approximately 40 percent of Internet email.

These two factors alone highlight the importance of having an appropriate solution in place for defending against these malicious messages. Leaving these items unchecked can cause significant problems for messaging systems such as increased disk space consumption, increased backup/restore times, utilizes LAN bandwidth, slower overall processing for legitimate mail and a decrease in productivity of its users.

While it may seem that SPAM only has an impact on email it also impacts Internet usage as well (via browsers as many of these new HTML email messages use hooks to your browser to pull in information). These messages often contain an image-based advertisement that cannot be scanned for content, which bypasses most products on the market today. These images are often large and consume bandwidth as the messages are opened in addition to "normal message traffic".

What are the options?
Solutions for defending against SPAM and viruses vary widely and are best broken into two categories, with the first category dealing with the physical source of the technology. The second category concerns the service/feature offerings within the third-party products.

Outsourcing (Category One) - Some organizations wish to outsource the entire solution. This reduces much of the potential administration that is dealt with by the IT staff. Over an extended period of time these outsourced solutions can provide a cost savings coupled with a technology benefit. The cost savings will come from hardware savings, as hardware lifecycle is no longer left up to the organization to depreciate and replace server or appliance devices. The technology benefit comes from the vendor managing both the hardware and anti-SPAM/virus technology, making certain that it is up to date, dealing with the latest outbreak or barrage of malicious email. An example of such an organization is www.netlinkblue.com.

Features (Category Two) - Within the industry today it seems that the options are almost limitless. As soon as administrators come up with new requests it seems that the vendors have them available. Here are some examples of functionality that may be considered by administrators:

Some administrators prefer to have an application that allows the recipient to decide if the email is spam as opposed to having an application make this determination for them. Other administrators want to empower the users to set specific parameters to identify spam in an attempt to remove false-positives (this is a term used for email that has been flagged/removed as spam that was actually a legitimate item).

Some administrators require an application to have a very quick setup although they are willing to deal with a trade-off of more intricate management of software updates, rules, and signature updates as it provides more control for the organization's policies.

Then of course there are appliance-type products that remove all controls from the organization. These solutions are often quick to setup and require moderate configuration once installed. Appliance-type devices have become more available in recent years although they require an organization to have a certain level of trust in the vendor's technology, change-control and overall comfort-level with the vendor's longevity and financial future.

Determining the Cost
To truly evaluate the cost of a solution, organizations need to review a standard set of criteria that will provide a baseline for offsetting the impact of SPAM and viruses crossing the corporate threshold. These standards should include initial hardware requirements, hardware maintenance, total server requirements (which in some cases may vary from initial hardware), additional software or technology, physical location space, switch port requirements (associated cost if available), and associated support salaries. Once these figures have been gathered the total dollars required could be used to determine two things: initial cost and projected re-occurring costs. Some solutions may seem to have an upfront cost that initially removes them from the decision process, yet when reviewing the long-term projected costs over 3 years and 5 years the solution may actually be more competitive.

There are also cursory costs that need to be understood, although they most often cannot have a dollar amount associated. These include items such as "learning curve" of the IT staff, where problems may be resolved slower based on more complex installations and configurations. Also on this list is the impact involved in updating software, hardware and SPAM/virus signatures. If signatures require manual intervention this may allow for "day one" virus outbreaks, etc. to slip through even the best designed systems. Having the signatures automatically updated can reduce the impact in some situations.
Finally, an organization needs to have an idea of the number of incoming messages.

This number alone can determine the type of solution chosen as it may require much more hardware than a standard implementation, or on the other hand it may also require less hardware requirements, which can be difficult to understand. Lesser hardware requirements may still require a single server or set of servers although those servers may be underutilized making cost justifications more difficult to manage. Keep in mind that vendors, as well as other technology experts insist that these servers only handle the anti-SPAM/virus solution. Mixing other applications into the environment can pose other vulnerabilities, such as firewall port exposures, relaying, etc.

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