Messaging Predictions for 2009

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Industry experts consider the future and offer thoughts and advice

Moving Beyond Email

“In 2009, messaging will continue to be less and less equivalent to email. The explosion in content sizes will drive users to ad hoc Managed File Transfer. Nonlinear collaboration modes will drive communities to wikis, SharePoint, and social networking sites. IM and SMS will blur with Yammer and Tweets. The toughest challenge will be to implement comprehensive messaging policy, both in the business and technical sense, as recent investments in email filtering, compliance, and archiving are broadened for messaging.”
—Axway VP of Technology John Thielens

Best Practice for Cutting IT Costs in 2009: Optimize Email Server Usage

“IT administrators can save a great deal of money by moving email from high cost transactional storage on the email server to low cost archival storage on a dedicated message archiving appliance. In addition, moving spam and virus filtering from your email servers to dedicated email security appliances saves server resources that would otherwise be committed to scanning.”
—Barracuda Networks VP of Product Management Stephen Pao

Greater Cooperation

“The United States Congress will reach new levels of cooperation in 2009 on privacy and cybersecurity issues. Partisan politics seemed to bury these issues during the previous Administration; however, there are many Republicans who are willing to work with Democrats, and vice versa, on these important issues with a less dogmatic voice in the White House.”
—Center for Democracy & Technology VP Ari Schwartz

Online Crime Economy

“As in the legitimate Internet economy, an online criminal world has become a global, thriving network of product and service providers and consumers doing business together. In the short term, this specialization and collaboration are making online criminals more nimble and effective. In the longer term, the online crime economy may also be on its way to becoming a bureaucracy. The positive about this: One unavoidable side effect of becoming more established is a paper trail, which may make it easier for law enforcement organizations worldwide to track and apprehend more of these offenders in the future.”
—Cisco Fellow and Chief Security Researcher Patrick Peterson

Increase in Managed Services

“In 2009, the adoption of managed services for email—hosted email as well as SaaS continuity, security and archiving—will accelerate dramatically. Three factors will drive this shift: (1) Shrinking IT budgets that drive cost reduction; (2) Increasing economies of scale for hosted services resulting in dramatically lower costs; (3) Increasing feature parity with on-premise alternatives. These changes will lead companies of all sizes, including the Fortune 500, to look closely at managed services to improve their email ecosystem.”
—Dell Director of Marketing Paul D’Arcy

Microsoft and SaaS

“There will be a great upsurge of interest among businesses in hosted messaging offerings. This will be stimulated by Microsoft’s SaaS versions of its messaging and collaboration offerings. There will also be strong interest in third-party offerings, especially those of Google and Cisco. As a result, Microsoft will start to experience more competition in the messaging space.”
—Ferris Research President and Senior Analyst David Ferris

Web Malware Poisons Trusted Online Brands

“Anyone who reads email or uses IM has already been attacked. Now, social networking users and even casual Web browsers are increasingly at risk. Cyber criminals are poisoning ‘trusted’ Web sites to spread Web-based malware using techniques like obfuscated JavaScript that exploit browser vulnerabilities. Facebook, Blogger, and the Google AdWords platform have all been hijacked to deliver malware. Dynamic, real-time detection of inbound Web attacks and outbound ‘callbacks’ to criminal servers is key to halting the spread of Web malware.”
—FireEye Founder and CEO Ashar Aziz

True Unified Communications

“2009 will be the year of convergence for the world of hosted messaging and collaboration. Microsoft’s release of Office Communications Server (OCS) 2007 R2, which includes an integrated IP PBX system, greatly narrows the gap between the email/IM and the telephony stacks, creating opportunities for true unified communications (UC) solutions. However, achieving true UC on-premise will continue to be challenging for most SMBs. Like Exchange 2007, OCS 2007 R2 runs exclusively on x64 hardware, and is both expensive and complex for SMBs to install, configure and manage on an ongoing basis. The same is true for modern IP-based PBX systems. This offers a great opportunity for hosted Exchange providers to build turnkey, unified communications SaaS offerings. They can combine email, instant messaging/presence, collaboration, voice and mobility to create simple, powerful and affordable integrated solutions that small businesses can use, without installing any complex hardware or software.”
—Intermedia Chief Operating Officer Jonathan McCormack

Secure Smartphones

“Smartphones today are accessing and storing the same amount of sensitive data as corporate laptops. Organizations must apply the same security principles to them as they do to desktops and laptops. Device encryption should be used to protect against device theft and/or loss, and end-to-end email encryption should be employed to ensure that only the intended recipient of an email can read it. With increasing privacy regulations, companies must consider their smartphones another endpoint, and secure them accordingly.”
—PGP Corporation Product Manager Doris Yang

DKIM and Domain Reputation

“We think that more ISPs will use DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) in their filtering systems in 2009. However, they still won’t be using it as a binary measure—either whitelisting all signed mail, or rejecting all unsigned mail—because bad mailers can authenticate their mail. With the increased use of DKIM, more ISPs will start to develop reputations for authenticated domains to start to separate good from bad mail streams. This will be particularly useful on shared IP addresses.”
—Return Path President George Bilbrey

Socially-Engineered Phishing Attacks

“2009 is going to be known as the ‘Year of the Social Networking Scam’. As more people publish details about themselves on social networking sites, this information will be used to generate ever more sophisticated socially-engineered phishing attacks. Driven by the difficult economy and increasing unemployment, Internet-based crime will also increase. Because of this, businesses will continue to make security a high IT priority in order to protect their brand from the fallout of online identity theft, forgery, and impersonation.”
—Sendio Founder and CTO Tal Golan

Increase in Mergers and Acquisitions

“This past year we saw an increase in attention surrounding issues such as IT department downsizing, increased usage of mobile email, spam and malware, and complete solutions over point products. Based on what I’ve seen and heard from industry experts, one prediction I have is that in the corporate world, especially in financial services and technology sectors, the number of mergers and acquisitions will increase, creating a market for applications (not point products) that aid in combining and transitioning multiple IT infrastructures into one.”
—Sendmail President and CEO Donald J. Massaro

Yes You Can: 2009 Is the Year of Change

“In 2009, businesses need to challenge themselves to be better than they were the year before. It’s only going to get tougher out there, so businesses need to become leaders in online privacy, paving best practices to protect the customers they do have, and put measures in place to attract new ones.”
—TRUSTe Executive Director Fran Maier

Cut Costs

“In 2009 every business will be taking a hard look at where they can cut costs. With more hosted services, companies can securely extend their network into the cloud and take full advantage of the dynamic nature of technology. Hosted Microsoft Exchange is a good example. Businesses no longer have to buy, upgrade, and maintain hardware and software; they can cut costs while enjoying the additional benefits of working with a single vendor and being able to focus IT resources on core business needs.”
—XO Concentric President Craig Collins