Are you losing GEMS?

Companies must not lose emails from their customers, suppliers and partners.

Today, email replaces most other forms of business communications (eg. fax, telex); it is the lifeblood of communication flow for most organizations. Currently, around 250 billion emails are sent worldwide daily. This is estimated to grow to over 500 billion by 2013.

As a consequence of email’s popularity, spam and malware have become key threat vectors to an organization’s network infrastructure, accounting for 80 – 90% of incoming email traffic. “To combat this, email filters have to be more aggressive. The higher the vigilance of email filter, the more spam is caught. However, this also results in users losing genuine emails. This problem of genuine emails marked as spam [GEMS] is also known as ‘false positives’. This dilemma is experienced across most organizations every day. Yet alarmingly, many are unaware of the actual level of risk that their spam filters are causing,” said Manish Goel, CEO of TrustSphere.

What losing GEMS is costing you

GEMS add unintended operational risk to those business processes which rely on email messaging. They threaten the integrity of such processes. The more important though harder to quantify consequences of GEMS include:
• Opportunity cost for sales and business development teams who miss time sensitive enquiries from prospects;
• Reducing customer service delivery standards – by not responding on a timely basis (or in some cases not at all) to a customer enquiry; Missing a time-sensitive email (eg. a change to a meeting or an electronic airline boarding pass) because it was trapped in the “junk” folder and not sent to an executive’s blackberry;
• Creating vast and varying impact on several other stakeholders’ reputation and customer relationships right across a business’s value chain.

The impact of these failures affect risk management governance, revenue and operational processes within an organization. It is estimated that losing GEMS costs businesses over $20 Billion annually.

Meeting Gartner’s standard
According to Gartner, an “acceptable” false positive standard for email security filtering services is one (1) lost email in every 400,000. Most vendors publicly claim their anti-spam filters are accurate to this level. However, independent research has shown that the actual false positive rate for most anti-spam filters is often several hundred times worse than the acceptable standard. The false positive rate among vendors can range between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000 of legitimate email. Statistically, this failure results in over 50 million emails everyday that are not being delivered to end users.

How many GEMS are you losing per month?

Fighting for Email Integrity
TrustSphere aims to redefine the agenda for email security by creating a new category of email security solution – Email Integrity. Their technology focuses on adding an email integrity layer that works towards active false positive prevention, while complementing organizations’ existing email security solution.

TrustSphere’s technology is designed to balance the two parts of the spam filtering problem by first protecting legitimate, authenticated traffic and then blocking spam.

It quickly and automatically builds an organization’s correspondence graph in order to “protect” and “fast track” traffic from its network of ‘known’, authenticated correspondents.

TrustSphere has developed a unique audit tool to help organizations measure the number of GEMS they are losing. Companies can request for an email integrity audit by sending an email to info@trustsphere.com.

TrustSphere solutions are available worldwide through a network of leading IT solution providers.

TrustSphere’s major partner across Asia Pacific is SingTel Alatum, the leading “in-thecloud” commercial grid computing solution provider to businesses and the public sector across the Asia-Pacific region.