An independent investigation by Quocirca
July 2004
An independent investigation by Quocirca
A QUOCIRCA CHANNEL SURVEY
Contacts:
Bob Tarzey
Quocirca
Tel +44 1753 754838
bob.tarzey@quocirca.com
Sponsored by:
In conjunction with:
Appliances email security and email
management
In June 2004 Quocirca spoke to UK channel organisations about email
management and content filtering and the suitability of appliances for delivering
these and other IT solutions
Business are concerned about the security threats that exist around email
and are prepared to invest in solutions to mitigate against these threats
No resellers believe their customers to be complacent about these issues, most
are concerned about the problems around email security and many consider it a
major threat. These days it is not just system availability that worries them but
also complying with legal issues that exist around email communication.
Nearly half of organisations still have no effective solution in place for in-
and out-bound email filtering
Many businesses realise the need to address both incoming and outgoing email
as part of their strategy to cope with these threats, but the resellers we spoke
with said that only 60% their customers had solutions in place for filtering
inbound email and slightly less, 55%, for outbound email.
Resellers often sell multiple email filtering solutions
In the past resellers have tended to recommend software based solutions, but
they are increasingly turning to appliance based and outsourced solutions.
Many of the traditional software based solutions have not been designed to cope
with the volumes of spam coming into their organisations and, in addition
to this, many of the appliance and outsourced solutions can now filter outgoing
email.
Most resellers accept appliances as a way of delivering IT services
The acceptance of appliances (specialised hardware optimised for specific
applications) is almost unanimous for firewalls and increasingly common for
spam and content filtering. Resellers accept that in the future, a