Virtualised security software appliances are playing a vital role in helping Internet service providers (ISPs) combat ever-increasing levels of spam, according to SpamTitan Technologies, maker of powerful yet easy-to-manage spam and Web filtering software.
SpamTitan International's sales for the financial year ended 31 December 2009 showed a clear trend among ISPs for cloud-, VMware- and ISO image-based anti-spam appliances.
Levels of spam account for 19 out of every 20 e-mails sent, according to the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) in its third annual spam report just published. The report urges ISPs to make a more "dedicated effort" to get spam under control.
ENISA says that a third of the largest service providers spend millions every year on anti-spam measures while one in four small ISPs has an annual spam-fighting budget in excess of R100 000.
“As levels of spam accelerate, ISPs are under pressure to apply increasingly costly resources to stopping malicious mail reaching customer inboxes,” says Ronan Kavanagh, SpamTitan CEO. “But ISPs have to balance this against the need to manage costs and win new business. SpamTitan is proving increasingly popular with ISPs for its ability to help them derive increased efficiencies by moving to a virtualised, cloud-based model and as well as for its accurate filtering and very low false positive rates.”
In 2009, the ISP sector accounted for 30% of SpamTitan's customer base and this is expected to rise to 45% in 2010. SpamTitan's ISP customer profile ranges from the small local providers to the very large industry providers supporting tens of thousands of users.
SpamTitan has been designed from the ground up to meet the complex scalability and management needs of ISPs and other managed e-mail service providers. More and more this means operating in a virtualised environment as ISPs seek to optimise their server usage. “SpamTitan is one of the few virtualised security solutions to offer an extensive set of tools that are specifically tailored to the needs of ISPs,” said Kavanagh. “Features such as cluster management help increase total system capacity, provide enhanced monitoring and automatic failover capabilities. ISPs also have the ability to add domains directly into the SpamTitan API to automate the process of adding new clients to an ISP's mail-filtering service. This flexibility, along with the product's reliability, capacity and tracking abilities, is invaluable to dynamic environments such as ISPs where customers subscribe and unsubscribe on a continuous basis.
ISPs have to ensure customers do not experience delays when trying to use their server. This can happen if bandwidth is being swamped by useless and potentially harmful spam. SpamTitan takes care of all this for ISPs freeing them to concentrate on other areas of the business. The January 2010 Virus Bulletin test cemented this fact voting SpamTitan number one in blocking the most spam ahead of many of the best known industry brands. According to Kavanagh, “SpamTitan provides ISPs with all the bells and whistles at a fraction of the cost. We see a large number of our new ISP customers moving from existing big brand names. ISPs are under a great deal of budgetary and service level pressure and we are delighted that more and more are turning to SpamTitan as their best option.”
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