Cloudmark Estimates Service Providers Worldwide Could Save $20B per Year with Improved Spam/Phishing/Virus Detection
Messaging Security Leader Delivers Highest Accuracy; Details Value to Providers
San Francisco, October 17, 2006 - Messaging security leader Cloudmark estimates service providers worldwide are spending billions of dollars unnecessarily due to missed or mishandled spam, phishing, viruses and other undesirable email. Cloudmark maintains a consistent 98% accuracy rate (defined as percent of malicious messages correctly filtered) in customer deployments and trials. In live networks as well as independent lab testing, Cloudmark maintains 17%-20% higher accuracy than its nearest competitor, an advantage that would save service providers worldwide between $8B and $19B. For example, a single Tier 1 provider with 2 million subscribers could potentially save $17-40M per year with more effective messaging management.
Most Costly Components
Having completed ROI analyses for providers with varying business models and in numerous geographic markets, Cloudmark has identified multiple areas of waste, including: maintaining standalone or disparate platforms for combating spam, phishing and viruses; churn & support; storage and infrastructure.
Specific estimates of resources wasted include:
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Churn and Support:Two major areas of ongoing operational expenses (opex), churn and support, are impacted greatly as inaccuracy leads to customer dissatisfaction and calls to complaint desks.
Churn: By effectively eliminating the 1.5-2.8% churn rate attributable to poor messaging security, service providers worldwide could save $7.2 - 16.8B annually. Churn related to spam is nearly always linked to accuracy, either in the form of too many unwanted messages reaching subscriber mailboxes or legitimate emails being stopped, potentially jeopardizing business dealings and revenue. Churn associated with bad message filtering translates into substantial expense as service providers' estimate costs to acquire the world's one billion Internet and email users at $300, and $200 and 3 months to reacquire or replace a lost subscriber and the lost revenue from churn.
Cloudmark Advantage: By filtering spam, phishing attacks and viruses with an accuracy rate of 98%, Cloudmark virtually eliminates false positives and minimizes customer concerns. Automated subscriber reporting, feedback and user-interface tools increase visibility into the network's high performance, increasing the "stickiness" of services by demonstrating effectiveness. The immediate response applied to misclassified messages further reduces customer frustration.
Support: Calls to the help desk increase with higher levels of inaccuracy, escalating to more expensive channels when the system fails to adequately address complaints. While escalation costs are difficult to gauge, initial help desk calls are estimated to cost service providers at least $15.
Cloudmark Advantage: Networks protected by Cloudmark generate 90% fewer complaint calls, approximately 1 in 100,000 versus 1 in 10,000 caused by legacy systems. At an average cost of $15 per support call, Cloudmark's accuracy advantages could save providers a minimum of $70M on support calls alone.
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Storage: Another significant cost of inaccuracy is having to store bad messages missed by protocol filters and delivery MTAs to reach subscribers' mailboxes. Providers generally store messages for a minimum of 30 days, often overbuilding storage facilities by 100% to keep population below 60%.
Cloudmark Advantage: Based on a range of $50-70K per terabyte of the enterprise-class storage used by service providers, savings of $400M to $1.6B can be achieved through increased accuracy.
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Infrastructure: According to Cloudmark's findings, 92% of the 100 billion emails now generated daily can be categorized as abuse. By stopping these messages at the edge of the network, Cloudmark allows only 8% of all messaging generated to reach inbound messaging servers.
Cloudmark Advantage: Cloudmark's light processing model allows anti-spam and anti-virus protection to be conducted in a single message scan, delivering a 10X performance improvement versus legacy systems that are generally over-built to accommodate virus management on separate systems. This increased efficiency could enable industry-wide savings of approximately $1B.
When sitting deeper in the network behind MTAs, Cloudmark substantially reduces computing resource utilization, often bringing CPU usage down from 50-90% to just 3-20% of total. This vast improvement often precludes substantial investment in additional hardware and enables reallocation of network resources. Stopping viruses at the earliest possible point also produces incalculable savings in service provider reputation, including the cost related to black listing as a result of zombie proliferation (see related release, "Cloudmark Stops Viruses Before They're Even Named," June 26, 2006
Residing at the network edge with gateway MTAs, Cloudmark achieves both a higher level of efficiency and industry-leading 98% accuracy using just seven fingerprinting algorithms to process messages. Other content filtering systems are too slow to be deployed at the network edge with protocol filters.
In independent lab tests, Cloudmark maintains a 17% accuracy advantage over the leading provider of legacy solutions for service provider infrastructures. Using only the components detailed above, a 17% differential in accuracy would translate into savings of $16.3B, a 2X impact on service provider infrastructure and operations that could potentially double the capacity of the messaging system.
NOTE: Cloudmark's estimation does not include soft costs such as staffing and data center costs, nor does it tally the cost of outages due to over-use of infrastructure that often drive additional equipment purchases. It also does not factor the cost of archival storage, which varies vastly from region to region.
Impact of Accuracy and Speed
With the accuracy and speed constituting the two greatest impacts on an email providers' service margin, Cloudmark cites the three best opportunities for improving that margin as:
- Reducing processing load and storage levels;
- Reducing malicious message-flow into the network;
- Improving customer satisfaction.
"Service providers bear the economic burden of messaging security," Bassam Khan, Vice President of Marketing at Cloudmark. "Subscribers expect their providers to keep mailboxes clear of abusive messaging, or they will move on to another provider. As we've noted, the cost of customer dissatisfaction and churn associated with poor filtering have the greatest impact on a service provider's margin, but infrastructure and opex costs are rising exponentially as well as the volume of mail continues to grow dramatically every year."
About Cloudmark
Cloudmark builds messaging security software that protects communications service provider networks and their subscribers against the widest range of messaging threats. Only Cloudmark Security Platform™ delivers instant security and control across diverse messaging environments, enabling communications service providers to create a safe user experience, protect revenue and safeguard their brand, while streamlining infrastructure and reducing operational costs. Cloudmark's patented solutions protect more than 120 tier-one customers worldwide, including AT&T, Verizon, Swisscom, Comcast, Cox and NTT.