Industry abandoning physical hardware approach to spam protection in favour of virtualized software appliances

Boston, MA and Galway, Ireland – 16 February 2010 – Virtualized security software appliances are playing a vital role in helping Internet Service Providers (ISPs) combat ever increasing levels of spam according to SpamTitan Technologies, the makers of powerful yet easy-to-manage spam and web filtering software.  SpamTitan’s sales for the financial year ended 31 December 2009 showed a clear trend among ISPs for Cloud-, VMware- and ISO image-based anti-spam appliances.

Levels of spam account for 19 out of every 20 e-mails sent according to the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) in its third annual spam report just published. The report urges ISPs to make a more "dedicated effort" to get spam under control.  ENISA says that a third of the largest service providers spend millions of Euros every year on anti-spam measures while one in four small ISPs has an annual spam-fighting budget in excess of €10,000 / $13700. 

“As levels of spam accelerate ISPs are under pressure to apply increasingly costly resources to stopping malicious mail reaching customer inboxes,” says Ronan Kavanagh SpamTitan CEO.  “But ISPs have to balance this against the need to manage costs and win new business.  SpamTitan is proving increasingly popular with ISPs for its ability to help them derive increased efficiencies by moving to a virtualized, Cloud-based model and as well as for its accurate filtering and very low false positive rates.”
 
In 2009 the ISP sector accounted for 30 per cent of SpamTitan’s customer base and this is expected to rise to 45 per cent in 2010. SpamTitan’s ISP customer profile ranges from the small local providers to the very large industry providers supporting tens of thousands of users. ISP customers moving to SpamTitan recently include HBC Networks and PageOne Communications.

‘SpamTitan's pricing actually came as quite a shock to us - it had more features than many of the other products we looked at, but cost substantially less,” explained Jim Brown, Network Analyst with HBC Networks. “Since we installed SpamTitan, it has blocked over 4.5 million junk emails that would otherwise have placed a serious drain on our customer's mail servers.”

“For me, the real winner with SpamTitan is its unlimited user licensing model at a realistic price,” commented Gavin Lowle, Principal Information Technology Engineer, of PageOne.  “Other advantages are its compatibility with VMware and how easy it is to deploy.  We had SpamTitan up and running in minutes. It also has an extremely small footprint and uses minimal resource overhead. The multiple instance and clustering options in SpamTitan for VMware, in conjunction with VMware Vmotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and High Availability (HA), ensure our e-mail infrastructure remains highly resilient at all times.”

SpamTitan has been designed from the ground up to meet the complex scaleability and management needs of ISPs and other managed email service providers. .More and more this means operating in a virtualized environment as ISPs seek to optimize their server usage. “SpamTitan is one of the few virtualized security solutions to offer an extensive set of tools that are specifically tailored to the needs of ISPs,” said Kavanagh. “Features such as cluster management help increase total system capacity, provide enhanced monitoring and automatic failover capabilities. ISPs also have the ability to add domains directly into the SpamTitan API to automate the process of adding new clients to an ISP’s mail-filtering service. This flexibility along with the product’s reliability, capacity and tracking abilities is invaluable to dynamic environments such as ISPs where customers subscribe and unsubscribe on a continuous basis.

ISPs have to ensure customers do not experience delays when trying to use their server. This can happen if bandwidth is being swamped by useless and potentially harmful spam. SpamTitan takes care of all this for ISPs freeing them to concentrate on other areas of the business. The January 2010 Virus Bulletin test cemented this fact voting SpamTitan No 1 in blocking the most spam ahead of many of the best known industry brands.  According to Kavanagh, ”SpamTitan provides ISPs with all the bells and whistles at a fraction of the cost. We see a large number of our new ISP customers moving from existing big brand names. ISPs are under a great deal of budgetary and service level pressure and we are delighted that more and more are turning to SpamTitan as their best option.”