SPAM on the rise says Internet Solutions

Issued by Stone Soup for Internet Solutions
Johannesburg, 10 Apr 2008

If you thought spam was boring - "yeah, so what? (Yawn) We have a spam filter anyhow" - here's a wake up call from those at the coal face (so to speak).

The anti-spam team at Internet Solutions (IS) are used to pretty high volumes of spam but last week, spam broke records by contributing to 97% of the total volume of all emails sent into their Anti Spam client community. "IS watched (initially with dismay) as our work queue averages across the anti-spam platform shot from 23 000 per hour to 30 000 per hour." says Hayden Lamberti, General Manager of Security Solutions at IS.

"Over the past three weeks, we've severely upgraded our Anti Spam infrastructure across our core Internet Data Centres (IDCs). Average memory utilization for our carrier class IronPort devices pushing 30 000 emails per hour through its work queue is 30%. Within a month IS will have over five carrier class IronPort devices per site. Based on what we've seen, we can comfortably handle 65 000 emails per hour through the work queue per machine. That's 325 000 emails per hour per site without running the boxes 'hot'. So we are well equipped to face the onslaught of increasing volumes and have capacity to meet market demand for the solution which will be driven by the higher spam volumes," says Lamberti.

In March, the team handled 1.65 billion emails of which only 70 million were valid. Says Lamberti; "Not only does filtering at the provider edge eliminate hundreds of spam messages flooding the user's inbox, but all that traffic is being stopped at IS before it goes down the clients leased line. This provides massive bandwidth savings as opposed to an onsite mail filter. And of course filtering spam at the provider edge removes a considerable amount of security threats to both the corporate network and to individual users."

Internet Solutions

Internet Solutions (IS), is Africa's leading New Age Telco, offering end to end converged communication solutions to our clients. The people at IS are passionate about constantly innovating and delivering solutions and services that are relevant and critical to their customers. These services are built on a world-class, secure, resilient infrastructure, delivered according to global best practices and effected in partnership with the world's leading technology vendors. It is through these services and solutions that IS creates a competitive edge for their customers communication needs, and promote sustainable business growth.

The business was founded in 1992 on the principle of developing a robust infrastructure in order for corporates and other organisations to communicate. Since then, IS has established itself as a leader in this space, attracting over 80% of South Africa's top businesses as clients. From listed companies to Non Governmental Organisations, local and national government and smaller companies, IS is enabling and evolving communications to meet the business needs of thousands of customers.

The company enjoys partnerships with major global players such as Cisco and Microsoft and holds Microsoft Gold Certification in the Hosting specialisation for Hosted Messaging and Collaboration (Hosted Exchange and SharePoint) and Managed Hosting Solutions - the first South African company to achieve this accreditation and was the first company outside of the US to be certified as a Cisco Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP).

Today the company enjoys a leadership position as it delivers services including: Hosting, Access, Security Solutions, Virtual Private Network (VPN), Mobile Solutions, VOIS, African Solutions, Broadband, and Application Services (ASP). Recent growth in the African economy has resulted in IS spreading its services across all parts of the continent as clients demand reliable and robust networking connectivity in the African market.

For more visit us on www.is.co.za

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