Find Out How Much Spam Costs Your Business

By Ashutosh Desai
Mumbai, Nov 21, 2008 1307 hrs IST


Businesses need to be as productive and efficient as they can, in order to be successful. With the economic slump, organizations are assessing their processes with a magnifying glass, trying to figure out how they can reduce costs without affecting efficiency levels. Spam--unwanted, unsolicited e-mail accounts for almost 90% of e-mails received by businesses today. Even though recent months spam through e-mail has not increased as quickly as was expected, it continues to be a hindrance to productivity levels. The bigger problem is that businesses do not realize the consequences of being a soft target of bots and spammers. Each employee in a company spends a few seconds to a couple of minutes removing unsolicited e-mail from the inbox. Make an estimate of the total time spent by all your employees in removing spam and you will realize how much time could have been used to doing some productive work. Google Apps Security Services provides a hosted mail solution called Google Message Security (a result of Google s acquisition of an e-mail and web security company called Postini), which will take the headache of dealing with in-house hosting as well as e-mail spam. This sort of a solution is not new--there are many mail hosting services available for businesses today. But the approach is a sensible one and comes with a nifty return on investment (ROI) calculator. The security services will not only filter e-mail spam, it will also upgrade its infrastructure as when required--reducing the expense that would otherwise be borne by the business. Since Google s mail hosting solution will filter spam before it reaches an employee s inbox, businesses will save on the bandwidth usage also. If you want to know how much e-mail spam is costing your business, try out the ROI calculator by Google Apps Security Services. If you host an in-house mail service, you can also use the total cost of ownership (TCO) calculator to find out how much it will cost you (values are in U.S. dollars) to invest in a spam management system and compare it with Google s mail hosting service cost.