Google helps firms weigh spam costs

With one big spam battle behind it, Google is set to continue the spam fight right to the enterprise. Its offering new ROI and TCO calculators designed to help enterprises not only weigh the costs of battling spam, but see the benefits of using Google's hosted Message security tool as well.

The ROI calculator is fairly simple, calculating the number of employees with e-mail, the number of workdays per employee per year, the average salary per employee, the average number of spam messages per day per employee and the number of wasted seconds per spam. For a 100-person firm with an average employee salary of $65 per hour and 50 spam messages a day, the calculator figures the total lost salary at $110,590.28 per year and lost productivity at 106 hours per year. In such a scenario, the calculator finds that Google's hosted Message Security will pay for itself in 3 days.

The TCO calculator is similar but it focuses on the cost difference for implementing an on-premises appliance-based message security tool vs. the hosted Google solution. It takes into account not only the upfront cost to buy an appliance, but also the ongoing IT support costs (none of which apply to Google's hosted solution). For an organization with two appliances, costing $1,000 each plus $24 annual licensing costs, and a seemingly high 9 hours per week of maintenance, the on-premises solution costs roughly twice as much as Google Message Security.

In the blog announcing the tools, Google's Amanda Kleha says that law firm Gaines, Wolter, & Kinney, P.C. of Birmingham, Ala., found that it was losing 122 hours per employee each year to spam, and considering the hourly rate of its lawyers, Google Message Security paid for itself in one day. Those number are hard to beat.

• Security
• Software
• calculators
• Google
• hosted
• Message Security
• ROI
• spam
• TCO