The
IS organization at virtually every midsize organization
is under tremendous pressure to “fix”
the spam problem now because of exploding storage
and bandwidth costs, as well as user complaints. As
such, deciding which anti-spam architecture, product
or service to use is critical. Gartner recommends
that when evaluating open-source or commercial offerings
that IT executives consider the following, which vendors
in this marketplace should be prepared to address:
| • |
Breadth
of Detection Techniques
Does the application include techniques such as
heuristics-based anti-spam rules, adaptive “learning”
engines, signatures, contextual filtering, whitelists
and blacklists? Does the antivirus vendor use
a multilayered approach or a cocktail approach
for ranking the probability that a message is
spam vs. a signature approach? Strong spam-filtering
vendors can also perform intrusion prevention
for mail servers, for example, which prevents
denial-of-service attacks. |
| • |
Research
and Service Abilities
Anti-spam products should be based on continual
research, updated detection technology, and “tweaking”
and content updating. Other criteria considered
in this area are the number of research staff,
affiliations with industry standards groups, university
or industry connections, and intellectual property
rights and research expertise. |
| • |
Management
and Administration
Key management and administration criteria include
template and ad hoc reporting, central console,
automated signature and heuristics updating, and
a graphical user interface for creating policies.
|
| • |
User
Support and Customization
This area would include whitelists at the enterprise,
business unit and user levels, as well as user
access to quarantined messages, such as through
a digest. |
| • |
Integration
With or Additional Capabilities
Many IS organizations don’t want three e-mail
filtering products or services, therefore offering
integration with or additional antivirus and e-mail
content-filtering capabilities is advantageous.
|
| • |
Service-level
Agreements
Outsourcing agreements should include metrics
such as percentage of spam caught, percentage
of false positives and system availability. |
Discuss
how anti-spam products or services are selected with
nearly 500 CIOs and IT Directors from midsize businesses
at Midsize
Enterprise Summit. Click
here for event details.
Reference
Research
Note
How to Select Spam-Filtering Products and Services
Publication Date: September 22, 2003
Authors: A. Hallawell and M. Grey, Gartner, Inc.
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