Vendor's spam patrol
SurfControl educates VARs to improve businesses' anti-spam take-up
Almost half of IT and business managers have no budget to spend on technology to counter spam, according to analyst IDC.
Its latest survey, sponsored by security software vendor SurfControl, questioned 1,000 UK companies.
The vendor is now trying to help its channel push the benefits of anti-spam. SurfControl is holding a webcast today aimed at educating their resellers to sell the technology. It will be open to about 800 of its resellers worldwide.
Martino Corbelli, marketing director at SurfControl, said businesses understand the problems, but resellers should not take the sale for granted.
"There must be a business case when you sell anti-spam products, and as a vendor we need to be able to show users the return on investment," he said. "With IDC we have been able to create a model using measurables to show this."
Brian Burke, research manager for security products at IDC, said the webcast aims to help SurfControl's resellers make a strong financial case for implementing technology to address the threat of unsolicited email.
"Spam has become both a potential legal liability and a major productivity and resource drain for corporate IT departments and corporate users alike," he said. "It is also viewed as a security threat because it can carry viruses, malicious code and fraudulent solicitations for pri-vacy information."
Dermot Coyle, managing director of SurfControl Platinum Partner ProLogic, said larger companies are taking up technology to beat spam, but there is still work to do in the SME space. "Most of our customers realise spam is a big problem, not only because of viruses but because it reduces efficiency," he said.
"Firms realise the cost because they always talk about bandwidth and how much of this resource spam takes up. It would be good if we could give some definitive figures on the cost of spam when talking to customers."