For someone living at the North Pole, battling blizzards is just part of getting through the day. But to someone in Fiji, the advantage of relocating from the Pole to a less demanding environment is obvious.
Likewise, office workers stuck in spam-rich environments are acclimated to fighting spam, but to anyone outside such an environment the obvious best move is to simply get away from the spam.
In the cyber world, making that move isn’t so hard. Before mapping it, let’s look at that spam blizzard.
Spam imposes both direct and indirect costs on an organization. The direct costs are the damages caused by malware, especially successful phishing. The indirect costs involve the cumulative loss of productivity resulting from each employee having to wade through the blizzard of spam in his or her inbox.
Both direct and indirect costs can go away with the right anti-spam service—it will change the environment.
Direct costs
The direct costs are from the damage imposed by phishing, the newest form of social engineering. Instead of pretending to call from the help desk to get someone’s password, scam artists use phishing emails to present carefully researched (and therefore entirely plausible reasons) for an employee to respond with login credentials, credit card numbers, or even actually send large sums of money.
The FBI calls successful phishing a Business Email Compromise (BEC), and has logged about 7,000 such events since 2013. The average BEC loss was $130,000.
In order to fight phishing, an organization has to raise the security awareness of the employees. They must understand that the organization is under continual siege by scam artists, requiring constant vigilance on their part. The fact that an email apparently displays inside information about the organization is not enough to trust it.
Or, the environment could be changed, ending the spam blizzard, so that phishing emails are not an issue.
Indirect costs
The indirect costs, meanwhile are predicated on the time it takes for an employee to react to a piece of spam, and that person’s hourly rate. If it takes 30 seconds to assess an email and then file or delete it, and if that person gets 60 per day (and that’s on the low side) an hour is accounted for. The average hourly wage in the US, for any kind of private employment, is about $25 per hour.
So assuming an hour a day of spam handling, spam costs your organization at least $25 per day per person. Worse yet, if it’s draining one hour a day from each person’s available time, that’s five hours a week, or one-eighth of that person’s work week. For every eight employees, you may as well hire a ninth to make up for the productivity being sucked from the others by spam.
Of course, there are ways to handle it. Employees should be encouraged to approach their email in an organized and disciplined fashion. They should set up a filing system, and set up automatic filters if they are using an inbox like Outlook. If it seems warranted, they should not hesitate to reply to a message or delete it.
Or, their organization can move to an environment where the blizzard can’t happen.
The new environment
The new blizzard-free environment would be one where all incoming email is from certified people or parties who have demonstrated a verified interest in corresponding with your organization.
Spam goes away. Phishing emails can’t get through. Email becomes a productivity tool, not a time sink or a tool for fraud.
That’s the Sendio way. By controlling the source of email, through techniques like a Sender Verification Process and Silverlisting™, unsolicited email will not arrive, and will therefore never become a threat to an organization’s productivity or bank account. You can request information for a quote to see just how effective it can be in keeping your organization safe.