Praetor 2.1 Released and Available
CMS NEWS ALERTFor new installations --
Download the free 21-day trial.
For existing customers -- Notification will arrive soon via email explaining how to get the latest "upgrade" version. CMS Tech Support says that Praetor v2.1 (as downloaded from the web for new installations) cannot be installed on top of existing Praetor v2.0 or v1.5 sites.
Click and read what's new and Improved in Praetor v2.1...AAS
Do it "in-house" or "farm-it-out"?
Seems to be an important question today in the email filtering world. Should you maintain the email filter or pass the responsibility to an outside service company? Not an easy question to answer. Keeping email filtering in-house requires more of a commitment from your IT department. Farming the filtering to an outside source requires less IT commitment on your part but you also relinquish a large portion of control over your corporate email.
Companies like
Postini and
SpamStopsHere are offering email filtering services that off-load a majority of the decision making responsibility as to what is spam to sources external to a company. Costly? Possibly, especially in the long term when the yearly bill comes in. But is it worth it to your corporate bottom line?
I've done some quick studies on the fee and cost structure of email filtering services. One prominent service charges $9.00 US per mailbox per year. Over a five year span (assuming modest yearly cost increases), this fee reaches over $26,000 US for a company with 500 email users. Another service company would receive almost $190,000 US for a 300 mailbox license. Wide range in cost and perhaps a wide range in services. Incidently, my company's product, Praetor, has a 5 year license and support license cost of $12,000 US for a 500 mailbox license.
An off-site filtering service's yearly fee though must be weighed against the expense of an in-house email administrator keeping a spam and content security filter up-to-date. So while costly, this seems like a good idea to have an off-site filter for email... free up your administrator's time and place the filtering burden on others.
But don't think that just by hiring an of-site filtering company, your email administrator won't have anything to do with spam, content security or email-bourne viruses. There are still whitelists and blacklists to customize and maintain with domains and addresses important to your company business. In-house, these lists can be maintained in real-time and altered as corporate situations require. Off-site, you have to go through the email filtering service.
Then of course false positives must be monitored (as an aside... I don't believe that anyone can claim a false positive rate of 0 and those that do should be looked upon with some skepticism). Here a question might be, what constitutes a false positive? Mine would surely be different from others in my company. As an employee can I go and check my personal quarantined messages held by the off-site email filtering service? Or do I need to contact my corporate administrator and have them view the quarantined message area for me. (Notice... here's a need to drag your email administrator into the day-to-day workings of the spam filter). Again comparing this to my company's
Praetor Messaging Gateway, Praetor has included free with every license, a browser-based personal log viewer, empowering users to view and act on messages in their own quarantine message area. Don't worry about viruses or blacklisted domains sneaking through, these never make it to the personal quarantine areas.
OK so let's say your corporate CFO is agreeable to the recurring fees and you don't mind you email administrator having to take the time to monitor false positives for every user's mailbox, are you willing to left potentially sensitive corporate data be filtered, quarantined and possibly stored outside of you corporate offices?
Would a law firm be well served by letting an outside service filter potentially sensitive mail? Would a doctor let private patient matters be held outside of their control? What about any other trade secrets or sensitive corporate data, would you be willing to pass this through a email filtering company outside of your corporate environment?
So now answer the question... Do it "in-house" or "farm-it-out"?
AAS
Opening Day
I used to go to the Tigers opening day in Detroit every year. Then a strike. And another strike. So I fell away from the baseball world for a while (I'm slightly back into it now, my kids play).
So baseball aside, why title this "Opening Day"? Well perhaps it is the opening day of my foray into 21st century blogging technology.
Currently, I'm planning to use this blog for observations and discussions on the subjects of spam filters , antivirus and message content filtering. But if you want to discuss the
Detroit Tigers, feel free.
By the way, CMS developed
PRAETOR, spam filtering, content security software. So be forewarned... I'm probably biased in my opinion (like everyone else in the blog world).
AAS
