Enemy at the gates

As businesses emerge from the recession with tightened IT budgets, resellers need to explore new ways to boost their revenue streams both in the short and longer term. When it comes to protecting business data, an opportunity for enormous and immediate benefits is available in adding perimeter-based security through cloud computing.
Over a quarter of a trillion emails are sent every day, of which 80-95 percent are spam or malware, depending on which report you read. Not only can these emails carry a security threat to the business, simply sifting through them is a hugely inefficient use of time for anyone, hence the widespread appeal of locally installing low-cost, internal anti-spam and firewall solutions on laptops, PCs and mail servers. 
 
There are several problems with taking this local approach. The biggest concern is that the bad stuff, even if it has been isolated, has already got inside your environment and is potentially hogging network bandwidth as well as server, storage and management resources.  Since the threat is constantly evolving, internal defences must be constantly managed and upgraded by what is usually an under-staffed, under-resourced and under-appreciated internal IT team. 
 
The alternative is a cloud-based email security application, which offers a robust filter for emails and blocks unwanted content in the cloud to prevent it from ever reaching its destination.
 
Managing email security in the cloud should generally be a better option for most businesses, as well as a long-term revenue stream for the reseller or service provider. By deploying an enterprise-class service to clean email traffic, a business should benefit from top-drawer email security at little incremental cost.
 
In fact, once the management time has been eliminated the total cost of ownership may prove to be reduced. While email security should be taken seriously, this doesn’t mean it needs to be expensive.
 
However, there are several hurdles that resellers must overcome when it comes to offering an ideal cloud-based email security solution. For example, resellers must keep in mind that companies vary widely in their willingness to relinquish control of email security to the cloud. So, top of the list of priorities is whether an email security solution can work in a private as well as public cloud environment.