The Economic Impact of Accuracy
Cloudmark filters spam, phishing, viruses and other messaging abuse with greater than 98% accuracy.
The Economic Impact of Message Filtering Accuracy
Service providers often think that their current message filtering solution is "good enough." In reality, even a small improvement in filtering accuracy can make a big difference for service providers and subscribers. Read the report.
When tested against competitive solutions in live network and controlled trials, Cloudmark accuracy levels were between 17 to 20 percentage points higher. Cloudmark's superior accuracy rate significantly reduces the volume of messaging abuse and its impact on the network and subscriber satisfaction.
Approximately 90-96% of all email traffic is spam or malware, according to data from the Cloudmark Global Threat Network, which processes over 3 billion messages per day. The number of phishing attacks alone grew 90% in the past year.
With this kind of growth in abuse volume, subscribers are reacting. According to the Gartner Group, 7% of email customer churn is directly related to excessive spam while 14% of subscribers would consider changing service providers to reduce spam.
Cloudmark limits the threat impact on the network infrastructure and improves the subscriber experience. It frees up mail storage, reduces infrastructure and supports costs and prevents customer churn. As a result, service providers are able to save millions in operation and capital costs.
Cloudmark's unmatched accuracy is result of networked collective intelligence, consisting of:
Intelligent Message Fingerprinting: precisely identifies spam, viruses, phishing and their variants in real time.
Cloudmark Global Threat Network: the world's largest threat detection network that includes over 180 million sources: service provider abuse teams, systems administrators, honeypots and reporters.
Trust Evaluation System: offers real-time corroboration of threat reports and reporters from the Global Threat Network to ensure the highest level of accuracy.
Economic Impact Analysis
Background
Cloudmark performed an in-depth analysis for a fast growing service provider with the following profile:
- 2 million email subscribers
- 40 million messages sent to content filtering servers/day
- 92% of all emails sent is some type of spam
Summary of Savings
Cloudmark's 98% accuracy in filtering all forms of inbound and outbound messaging abuse offered substantial benefits in reducing infrastructure CAPEX in addition to costs related to customer support and churn.
| Cost Categories | Year 1 Net Savings (US$) |
|---|---|
| Customer Care and Churn | 8.7M |
| Messaging Infrastructure (MTA, servers, storage) | 3.6M |
| Total Costs Savings (Year 1) | 12.3M |
Customer Experience Impact
Cloudmark removed an additional 6.2 million spam messages from subscriber inboxes each day. Prior to Cloudmark, the service provider's customers received, on average, over twice as many spam messages as legitimate messages. After Cloudmark was implemented, the number of spam emails that customers received dropped by 90%
| Solutions | Ratio of Spam to Legitimate Mail |
|---|---|
| Cloudmark Authority | 0.2 |
| Legacy Anti-Abuse System | 2.2 |
Churn and Support Savings
Subscriber revenues and support costs are tied to satisfaction with mail services. Most subscribers expect their service providers to solve the spam problem. Low accuracy in catching spam leads to calls to customer support and, eventually, email churn.
By filtering spam, phishing and viruses with greater than 98% accuracy and near zero false positives, Cloudmark virtually eliminates support calls and churn related to ineffective handling of messaging abuse. These benefits lead to higher customer revenues and reduced operational expenses.
Furthermore, Cloudmark enhances subscriber retention by clearly demonstrating Cloudmark's effectiveness in filtering unwanted messages through the Cloudmark Network Feedback System and Customized Webmail statistics.
First Year Net savings: $8.7M
Storage Savings
Service providers typically store spam and other junk mail missed by their content filters for 30 days or more. As the volume of spam continues to grow, service providers must purchase additional mail stores to keep pace.
By removing messaging abuse before they enter message stores, Cloudmark was able to increase storage capacity for this customer by 12.5 terabytes.
First Year Net Savings: $750K
Infrastructure Savings
Cloudmark significantly reduces messaging infrastructure total cost of ownership (TCO) through:
- Filtering out 92% of total mail traffic at the edge – with greater than 98% accuracy
- Offering comprehensive protection against spam, phishing and viruses, eliminating the need for separate hardware / software solutions to combat each type of abuse
- Using lightweight fingerprinting algorithms that reduce CPU utilization by up to 90% compared to traditional rules-intensive filtering systems
As a result, Cloudmark was able to reduce the number of required edge MTA servers from 153 to 12, saving both capital and operational costs.
First Year Net Savings:$2.8M
Total First Year Savings = $12.3 Million
To learn how much Cloudmark can save your organization annually, please contact sales@cloudmark.com.