Surf’s up

Citation

(2004), "Surf’s up", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 53 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2004.07953fad.001

Surf’s up

SurfControl, the world’s number one Web and e-mail filtering company, has made available a free online resource to help corporate information technology (IT) managers quantify the cost of spam and assess the business value of e-mail filtering solutions.

According to a recent study of spam and anti-spam solutions by IDC, a leading global industry analyst firm, the majority of IT managers from the public and private sector view spam as a problem that should be addressed as part of a larger network security solution. However, almost half of public sector respondents reported that they had no budget to address this need. Complicating this problem further, SurfControl has noted that there are few publicly-available tools to measure the financial impact that spam has on organizations. IDC’s survey was based on responses from over 1,000 IT and business managers.

The interactive ROI Calculator for Anti-Spam Solutions, available though SurfControl, was developed by IDC as part of its recent study. The calculator helps measure the total financial and productivity-related benefits a company can expect to receive on average from an anti-spam solution. In addition to measuring the total cost of spam to the organization, the calculator provides users with a five-year return on investment (ROI) analysis, an annual payback analysis and the five-year net present value for the anti-spam solution in place. These measurements are based on the number of e-mail users, the set-up and maintenance costs, and the type of commercial anti-spam tool the company has in place.

IDC predicts in a recent White Paper, What You Can and Should Do about the Rising Cost of Spam, that anti-spam providers will need to integrate multi-layered spam identification and protection capabilities in order to maximize spam control. The White Paper also predicts that a growing number of firms will prefer comprehensive secure content management tools that include anti-virus, firewall, Web filtering and related capabilities to help correlate and analyze emerging blended threat attacks.

The ROI Calculator, which was developed for SurfControl by IDC as part of its recent Anti-Spam Survey, is available at: http://www.surfcontrol.com/resources/asroi/. IDC’s new White Paper, What You Can and Should Do about the Rising Cost of Spam also is available at http://www.surfcontrol.com/general/assets/whitepapers/rising_cost_of_spam.pdf