Evaluating Messaging Infrastructures

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Global 1000 companies that were interested in evaluating their existing messaging infrastructures signed up for Sendmail’s Messaging Architecture Review Program. Offered as a professional service, the program included reviews and interviews with representatives of all department stakeholders from IT, Messaging, Security, Human Resources, Marketing, Sales, Finance and other functions that rely upon email for mission-critical communications with employees, customers and partners.

Nearly 85 percent of enterprises discovered security vulnerabilities and scalability flaws that threaten email trust and reliability within their organizations. Over 93 percent of these enterprises also discovered significant cost savings could be found by reallocating existing budgets to combat threats by modernizing the way the messaging infrastructure manages email.

“While conducting a Messaging Architecture Review with our Messaging Architects, many customers were surprised to find they had so many ‘point products’ deployed over the years that were actually hurting their ability to effectively manage growing email volumes, and creating more management complexity than necessary,” says Glen D. Vondrick, executive vice president and COO for Sendmail. “It’s not actually all that surprising though if you think about the evolution of email—historically, businesses have tactically reacted to the increase in spam, viruses, malware and content security requirements by simply adding products to the infrastructure to address problems as they arose without regard to the impact on outdated architectures.”

Cost cutting in IT is an ongoing theme in this economic environment. According to Sendmail those participating in the review program were interested in assessing various messaging trends in cloud computing, virtualization of the data center, and determining how to separate core infrastructure functions from lower value applications. After having conducted previous rounds of IT cost-cutting measures, one Fortune 500 multi-national enterprise participating in Sendmail’s program moved to a hybrid architecture using a virtualized message processing platform for control of critical messages while also moving low-value filtering applications to cloud computing.

Published December 3, 2009