Cloud Email Spam Solutions to Protect your Organization

Spam equals loss of productivity as employees grapple with hundreds of illegitimate emails in their inboxes. Phishing results in breached data, the loss of privileged credentials, and a damaged reputation. Cloud-based email spam filtering solutions offer a cost-effective way to stop spam and phishing turning inboxes into war zones.

What happens if email is left unfiltered?

Spam emails have blighted worker productivity since the advent of computing. The Internet Society suggests that the first ever spam email was sent to users of the nascent internet known as “ARPANET”. The email, innocuous by today’s standards, contained an unsolicited ad for a presentation by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC).

Since then, the number of both legitimate and illegitimate emails dropping into inboxes the world over has increased to a staggering 320 billion every day. This figure is for 2021, showing an increase of 19% on 2017 numbers: the number of emails dropping into inboxes is expected to continue to rise.

54% of emails that are spam end up cluttering an employees inbox when the company does not employ a spam filtering solution. These emails could act as a conduit to a cyber-attack!

Email clutter

Too many emails in an employee’s inbox lead to demotivation and productivity issues. Employees need to be able to focus on legitimate emails, not wade through spam email. Burnout is a real problem in the modern business world. According to McKinsey, employees spend 28% of the workday reading and answering emails. This can take hours out of a working day.

Adding even more emails to wade through, that turns out to be illegitimate spam, just adds more time to the working day, adding to employee frustration and reduced productivity. An overloaded email inbox, stuffed with pointless spam emails, can even cause health issues in workers according to one study.

Phishing emails

Phishing is the #1 method used to breach data and IT systems. Phishing and spear-phishing along with social engineering emails can be extremely difficult for even security trained staff to spot. The results of phishing are legend. According to Verizon, 96% of social engineering-led attacks were delivered via email in 2020.

Phishing emails are successful with 20% of employees clicking on phishing email links and almost 68% of those entering login credentials into a spoof website. Once login credentials are in the hands of a cybercriminal, they are used to circumvent corporate network protection that leads to malware infection, such as ransomware.

 The answer to the spam email problem is to block illegitimate emails at the source using cloud email filtering solutions.

We recently held a webinar with Osterman Research demonstrating how to reduce the risk of phishing and ransomeware. Download the guide here to maximize your organization's email protection.

Or watch the webinar here.

Why are cloud email filtering solutions important?

Cloud email spam filtering solutions offer a flexible, affordable, scalable, and accessible way to protect email. Cloud email filters provide first class email filtering for any size organization from an SMB to an enterprise.

When a company chooses to use the services of a cloud-based spam filter, such as SpamTitan, they are deploying email protection across the entire extended network to all internet-connected endpoints. Because the spam filter is hosted in the cloud there is no capital expense and the protection is automatically updated, ensuring that even new threats are prevented.

By using a cloud email filtering solution, a company actively chooses to use flexible scaling across an increasingly diverse endpoint portfolio. In an era when employees are likely to work remotely at least part of the time, the flexibility offered by cloud spam filtering is essential.

Spam email fraudsters use every trick at their disposal to circumvent protective measures. A cloud-based email filtering solution provides the agility needed to adjust settings and update endpoints automatically to ensure that email protection is robust and always-on. 

What are the benefits of cloud spam filtering?

There are a variety of benefits to protecting email using a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution such as cloud spam filtering. The main ones can be categorized as:

Multi-layers of email protection

SpamTitan cloud email filtering uses the same multi-layered approach to protect emails as physical device-based email filters.

The multiple layers of protection use a mix of:

• Harvesting/dictionary attack protection
• Collaborative spam fingerprint checks
• RBL tests (real-time blackhole list)
• Bayesian analysis
• Rule-based spam scoring
• Allow and block list filters

Using these multiple layers of protection, emails are scanned to detect signals that identify spam, malware, zero-day threats, and other advanced threats, including possible ransomware. Any suspicious emails are stopped before they reach an employee’s inbox. SpamTitan also applies machine learning to ensure that both known and emerging threats are prevented.

SpamTitan is an advanced and highly effective spam filter service, with a market leading 99.99% Spam Catch Rate with a 0.003% false positive.

Centralized, easy administration

As SpamTitan is a cloud-based spam filtering solution, the administration is centralized. This means that updates can be quickly and easily pushed out from a central control console to all connected devices across the expanded corporate network. Automated updates are a key tactic in preventing impact from emerging threats.

Easy deployment

Cloud email filtering solutions differ from virtual or physical appliances as the filtering mechanisms operate in the cloud. This makes cloud-based solutions easy to deploy and configure. By making a small change to a mail exchanger (MX) record, the redirection of inbound and outbound emails through the service provider’s server is optimized.

Minimal maintenance and little overhead

Cloud-based spam filters are deployed as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. This means that your spam filtering service is hosted on your behalf, and therefore, available on demand. Your company then has minimal maintenance overhead and requires no capital investment; the managed service hosting the email filter, on your behalf, is responsible for this overhead.

Support for granular and local policies

Hosted in the cloud does not mean that a company must lose control of its policies. Deployment of a cloud-based email filtering solution, such as SpamTitan, allows businesses to retain full control of their email filtering policies. Also, with SpamTitan your business can choose to apply policies by individual user, user-group, or business-wide, through integration with directory services such as AD.

Cloud email filtering optimizes productivity

The levels of spam email and phishing are out of control, but cloud spam filters protect email and give back that control to companies of all types and all sizes. By using a cloud email filtering solution a business controls both its inbound and outbound emails in a cost-effective way. The employee inbox is then no longer an attack surface but a productive work area.

Looking for an email spam solution for your organization? Sign up for SpamTitan's Free 14-Day Trial.

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