Spam will not be the death of e-mail: Marshal`s Macnair

The increasing volume of spam will not drive small to medium-sized businesspeople to use alternative communications tools, in preference to e-mail.

In April 2007, the IDC (the analyst research firm) released a report that suggested that the increasing volume of spam e-mail messages could drive users to reduce their reliance on e-mail and turn to alternative communications mediums, such as instant messaging and low-cost voice over IP (VOIP) calls, instead.

They are certainly right about the increasing volumes of spam. According to the Marshal Threat Research and Content Engineering (TRACE) team, which monitors spam and malware activity worldwide, spam volume increased by 200% in 2006.

In fact, depending on whose statistics you use, spam accounts for anywhere between 70% and 90% of all e-mail worldwide. However, I believe they are mistaken in suggesting that business reliance on e-mail will be reduced as a result.

Many factors affect the business e-mail market. For example, small to medium-sized businesses may not be able to afford full-time IT employees, but they still need to protect the business against spam and viruses.

Most organisations can deploy a cost-effective spam filter, so I don`t see spam killing off e-mail, even in the small user segment. However, as spammers and their techniques become more sophisticated, it could become difficult for smaller businesses to keep their protection up to date. Consequently, many are turning to managed service providers to provide an outsourced solution to the spam epidemic.

To date we`ve experienced significant success working with managed service providers in South Africa, such as Internet Solutions, to ensure that small to medium-sized businesses don`t need in-house skills to get clean e-mail delivered to their inboxes.

Both e-mail and IM (instant messaging) have their place in the business communications arena, and they complement, rather than compete against one another. As IDC mentions, IM is seeing gradual business penetration as younger employees, used to IM in the home market, utilise it in the workplace.

IM is a great tool, because it`s both an instant communications medium and it provides presence management. As soon as you log on, you know who else is online. However, the messages are more transient than e-mail and are not seen as an alternative medium to its use in business.

Businesspeople today have multiple communication channels available to them, and IT departments must factor these into the organisation`s overall security programme.

Web-mail and peer-to-peer (P2P) are becoming increasingly significant business tools. We should treat Web-mail separately to e-mail, in my view, because it is accessed from anywhere, whether inside or outside the organisation; P2P software, such as Skype, is also growing in terms of business use and organisations need to protect their users and infrastructure from all of these threats. That`s where the complexity arises and where IT security has to become more sophisticated.

Unfortunately, today most organisations don`t control IM in their environments. There`s no monitoring, content security or threat checking in IM environments, even though you can use IM to transfer viruses as easily as via e-mail. Most organisations neglect to protect even that risk in their business.