Running a successful business requires a great deal of time and energy. Sweat, blood and tears in most instances. There is nothing worse than having to waste time and energy dealing with spam when you’d rather be getting important things done.
So, how common is spam and how does it impact your business?
People cannot stand spam. In fact, they despise it. As well as damaging productivity and being a huge headache, it can send stress levels through the roof. It can dramatically increase the chances of system downtime and require numerous support or helpdesk hours to fix.
Recent research from DataCurve and the University of Melbourne shows that Australian businesses are still affected by spam. 57.8 percent of users report they are affected by spam on a daily basis; 28.5 percent of users deal with spam by the hour. The most felt impact of spam is wasted time (46.7 percent) and 26.8 percent of users find it very frustrating. But why does it happen in the first place?
How do spammers get hold of my business email?
As a successful business owner you are probably working to generate publicity, grow your brand, actively network, communicate with your clients and stakeholders, and ultimately build a business you can be proud of. Such noble traits are unfortunately a double-edged sword when it comes to spammers.
By putting your company out into the wild and disclosing your business email, you open yourself up to having your address harvested. You may do this inadvertently in a number of ways including giving out as business cards, disclosing information on your company website, having standard email address formats, via social media profiles and sharing information in legitimate online discussions.
What can businesses do to protect themselves?
To minimise the chances of your company being spammed, there are a number of steps you can take – such as not disclosing full email addresses in readable format [eg. use sales(at)yourcompany(dot)com(dot)au] or using a different email address to engage in online discussions. You might also choose to use contact forms as opposed to linked email addresses on your site.
Unfortunately, the reality is that once your email is harvested, there is not a lot you can do to take it back. Once harvested, don’t grin and bear the consequences of spam – you’ll need to find a solution that works for your company.
How cloud security can kick spam into touch once and for all
These days, there are smart ways to eliminate spam that require minimal administration and actually reduce the burden on your IT resource.
By choosing filtering in the cloud, you can deal with spam on a company-wide basis, so individuals no longer have to. You reduce the bandwidth and storage pressure on your business network because spam (making up over 70 percent of all email) is removed before reaching your servers. What’s more, there is no complicated hardware or software to manage.
Removing spam really is a painless experience that every business should do to maximise employee productivity and increase operating efficiency.
