* A couple of vendors selling messaging threat protection to small businesses
It can be difficult for small and midsized businesses to manage their messaging environment: many are large enough to face the same messaging-related problems that large enterprises face, but they are too small to fully utilize IT and other resources necessary to solve the problems. The result is that their costs on a per-user basis tend to be much higher than for larger organizations.
Compounding the problem is that it’s difficult for vendors to sell into the SMB market because selling is an expensive process, and the return per customer is lower for SMBs.
Two companies offering messaging threat protection to SMBs are IronPort Systems and CipherTrust. The IronPort C10 Messaging Gateway Appliance offers protection from viruses and spam, policy enforcement for both inbound and outbound e-mail, IronPort’s Reputation Filters that allow blocking or slowing of suspicious e-mail before it enters a network, and message flow management.
The CipherTrust IronMail S-Series, also provided in an appliance, protects against viruses and spam, enforces policies, filters content and analyzes the content, including attachments.
These are but two of the many messaging products that address SMBs. Vendors will increasingly be attracted to this market given that there are so many more SMBs than large organizations, and given that the market has sophisticated messaging threat protection requirements that are not yet being fully addressed.
