Anti-virus software companies are fine-tuning their
security offerings to supply organisations with tools or services
to make e-mail gateway boundary protection more manageable in the
fight against spam.
Trend Micro launched its Spam Prevention Service (SPS) this
week. The product borrows technology from e-mail security provider
Postini's heuristics rule engine to filter spam by different and
configurable category types, said Jeanie Boots, global product
manager for content technology and anti-spam at Trend Micro.
Symantec's enterprise anti-spam product is due out later this
month, although no details were available.
Trend Micro officials will use its Active Update Server
structure to let customers tweak SPS’ heuristic engine with the
latest spam attack or patterns updates just as they would for
downloading the most current virus signatures. Eventually,
value-added services including real-time spam monitoring,
sophisticated quarantining, and policy management could be added as
part of SPS’ software subscription service, Boots added.
Trend Micro’s SPS offering, which ships this week, supports Sun
Solaris servers. The company will offer SPS for Microsoft Windows
NT in May, followed by a Linux version by June.
Despite acquiring anti-spam maker Deersoft at the start of 2003,
Network Associates may have the toughest road ahead to enable
co-ordinated spam protection at the network gateway, server and
desktop level.
It may be faced with extensive engineering to enable the
desktop-oriented Deersoft SpamAssassin to be enterprise-ready and
co-exist with McAfee and Network Associates technology, said
Maurene Grey, research director at Gartner.
Grey said customers are flocking toward anti-spam products to
re-acquire strong operational efficiency and implement a "security
guard" to oversee spam protection, virus protection, and content
filtering chores simultaneously – a trend that AV vendors have
likewise targeted.
"The [market] consolidation is being carried out by the leading
players in the space of e-mail boundary protection and that gets us
to Trend Micro, Symantec, and NAI," said Grey. "They’re already
well known and already have a stake. This provides [customers with]
licenses bundling and benefits to the enterprise."
Gartner has forecast that by 2004, half of all e-mail will be
spam-related.
Exacerbating the problem, competition for customers’ affections
is fierce. Organisations must decide if they want to entrust their
spam protection to a services model offered by Postini and
MessageLabs, a licensed software approach from suppliers such as
honey pot-probe network based BrightMail as well as SurfControl, or
a hardware "box" perspective from CipherTrust.
"Everybody is using a combination of different techniques. This
is the added layer of complexity. It’s all got very confusing to
the enterprise [customer] to figure out first what is the right
partnering approach to ensure that two years from now when
consolidation is over, we have a vendor that is still in business,"
Grey remarked.