Jun
4
2009

The Hidden Costs of Spam

You don’t have to be an IT expert to know that spam is a huge problem, for businesses and individuals alike. A study by the state of California estimated that spam cost US companies and organizations over $13 billion in lost productivity and overhead. Unlike the junk mail that litters your physical mailbox, the cost of spam is shouldered by the recipients, not the senders. It’s been estimated that half or more of all e-mail sent is unwanted spam. That means for a service provider, more than half of all their e-mail traffic has no benefit to their customers, and is in fact a nuisance. At every step closer to the end user, this trend continues.

Setting aside the productivity costs for a minute, consider the expense in storage and bandwidth when some 50% of all e-mail traffic is unsolicited spam. Cutting corners isn’t an option, because of the risk of losing or otherwise delaying legitimate mail. Spammers operate by leeching resources, and stolen credit cards, hacked servers, and spoofed network addresses are all tools in the spammers arsenal. Policing these types of activities is a full time job for network service providers, and something that the average business simply doesn’t have the resources to effectively accomplish.

As with anti-virus measures, anti-spam solutions are an ongoing process. Constant vigilance is required to keep up with the latest blacklists, filters, and known spammers. This is a drain on IT man hours that would otherwise be spent in revenue generating efforts. Unfortunately, even the best in-house anti-spam practices too often are barely able to stem an increasing tide.
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May
27
2009

Protecting your data with Managed Services

It’s not just a little ironic that the often quoted Murphy’s Law was coined long before data storage changed from boxes in a warehouse to zeroes and ones on a magnetic disc. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong is a truism in the IT arena. As anyone who has experienced the loss of critical files on a hard drive, memory stick, or even a phone number scrawled on a napkin can tell you- there’s nothing like that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you know the information is well and truly gone.

As maddening as it can be to lose personal data, when it comes to your business it’s a mistake that could be catastrophic. As a result, data backup solutions are a multi-million dollar industry, and to be sure, there are many options to consider. From automated robotic tape rotation machines to software driven RAID disc arrays, there are solutions to fit any scenario. Unfortunately they also share a common weakness: unless your core business actually is data backup, managing your backup solution in house assumes responsibility for a complex process without the human resources it takes to do it correctly. That’s a complicated way of saying if you handle your own backups, chances are you’re going to run into Murphy’s Law, and it won’t be pretty.
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May
18
2009

Rain in the Cloud, and Finding the Silver Lining

The recent Google outage made a lot of people sit up and take notice. By some accounts, an outage that lasted a little over an hour impacted total internet traffic for the day by 5%. Gmail and other Google Applications were unavailable, and underneath the collective sigh of frustration was a decreased confidence in the ubiquity of ‘the cloud’. To their credit, Google reacted admirably to the problem, was up front with users, and had a resolution in place quickly. Despite that, a lot of people got a taste of the danger of having all the eggs in one basket.

It seems like an oxymoron, but free comes with a price. In the case of Gmail and related applications, that price is paid in limited functionality and reliability. The value of that price is a sliding scale. Taking an extra couple of minutes to track down an e-mail is a minor cost, having a primary business communications tool down is a major one. For casual users this isn’t a big deal, but in a business environment it’s a huge one.
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Apr
24
2009

Exchange 2010 Reveals Great Future for Business Class Email

At NaviSite, we find the college basketball tournament kind of exciting, and yeah, we’ll probably tune in for the finale of Dancing With The Stars. But here at NaviSite HQ, when it comes to real excitement it’s hard to beat the recent announcement of Microsoft Exchange 2010.

The thing is, when it comes to NaviSite and Exchange, we go way back. We’ve been a leading provider of Exchange hosting for a decade, going back to 1999 with our offering of managed hosted Exchange 2k. We’ve spent the last ten years helping businesses of all sizes take advantage of the power and convenience of a Hosted Exchange mail solution, and with the advent of Exchange 2010, that high level of service and support will transform the way businesses communicate.
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Apr
22
2009

Making Small Business Anytime, Anywhere Communications a Reality

After years of devices that didn’t quite live up to expectations, the smartphone revolution is upon us. With the mass consumer penetration of BlackBerries, iPhones, and other next-gen handhelds, smartphones are changing the way we interact with information, and businesses who don’t adapt to this new environment will find themselves falling quickly behind their competition.

Over the last 15 years e-mail and cell phones went from novelties to critical business tools. Those of us who are a little longer in the tooth remember struggling with brick sized cell phones and command line Pine based e-mail accounts provided by the local library, and that so much has changed so quickly belies the relatively short time frame.
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