Survey: Hosted email security can cut costs

Conducted by Osterman Research and commissioned by Trend Micro, a recent study found that more than 70 percent of respondents would consider hosted if it reduced their costs by 50 percent.

Despite a misperception that hosted email security is more expensive than an on-premise most enterprise organizations spend a mean of $63 per email user per year on hardware, software, licensing agreements, physical storage and other expenses for an on-premise email infrastructure. This doesn’t include the management costs associated with maintaining and managing on-premise email infrastructure via IT staff, which can raise the costs significantly higher.

Other notable findings from the research report include:

• On-premise messaging security systems experience a mean of over 30 minutes of downtime monthly, or six hours of downtime per year. This means that for six hours per year, users are not protected against spam, malware and other threats. Many hosted email security solutions are backed by Service Level Agreements that promise less downtime than can be supported by onsite solutions, and they are often supported by money-back guarantees
• According to the survey, 46 percent of organizations had experienced a security breach during the last 12 months; in addition, it takes a mean of more than five hours for signature updates to be deployed. With hosted email security, businesses immediately get the most up-to-date protection offered by the vendor, thus increasing protection and reducing security breaches.