Though email continues to be an important communication tool in business today, Trend Micro security experts consider a majority of email traffic to be “abusive.” As spam continues to grow, traditional on-premises email security products are failing to keep up. These products often suffer from inherent hardware capacity limits, rendering them unable to handle large spam volumes. Once the amount of spam exceeds the limit, these solutions rapidly become overloaded, significantly slowing email delivery. This traditional model also fails to stop spam before it enters the network, exposing the company to a steady stream of email threats while adding significant infrastructure costs, such as bandwidth and storage, as spam consumes staff and network resources. On-premises email security products also require ongoing tuning to maintain effectiveness, and that usually means at least a partially dedicated person to keep the product up to date. Too often, then, organizations face a trade-off between two undesirable alternatives: on the one hand, suffering from lower user productivity due to more spam showing up in email boxes, and on the other, having IT staff spend a greater percentage of each day maintaining, tuning, and troubleshooting email security products.
