– Ronan Kavanagh, CEO of SpamTitan Technologies (www.spamtitan.com), says:
The security landscape has changed completely with virtual appliances becoming an unstoppable force. In the past 3 years, we have seen user demand completely transformed. Where once there was near universal demand for security hardware systems there is now an overriding preference for virtual appliances and cloud based solutions. This dramatic customer shift away from physical appliances can be put down to the cost advantage and easy management of virtual appliances and fatigue with the high cost and management overheads associated with physical appliances.
SpamTitan On Demand was launched earlier this year and adds a third deployment option to the award winning SpamTitan anti-spam solution suite. Previously SpamTitan offered IT managers a flexible choice between an ISO option where user download the software as an image file, burned this to CD for installation on local hardware or deploying SpamTitan in a virtual environment using the virtualisation of choice. Based on a growing number of requests for a cloud based option SpamTitan On Demand was developed, this is a cloud based SpamTitan virtual appliance available on demand and dedicated to your organization.
We had many requests from customers looking for a hosted or cloud version of SpamTitan but we didn’t want to offer a standard hosted service of which there are many. What’s unique about SpamTitan On Demand is that there are no shared resources unlike other cloud based email services. This unique deployment option gives users all the benefits of an appliance based solution but without having to utilize your own resources. The full solution is offered by SpamTitan so you don’t even have to deal with a hosting company. All the benefits of SpamTitan coupled with the benefits of the cloud, including back up, redundancy and scalability.
A big advantage of SpamTitan regardless of which deployment option is chosen is the fact that there is instant availability meaning that should any disaster occur a new SpamTitan can be downloaded in minutes and applied to the configuration. For centralized management, SpamTitan allows user to cluster appliances to have complete control over their configuration and policy across the cluster and the ability to share the “load” across all cluster nodes so that administrators can change policy or access any message received across the cluster from any individual node. The cluster can be managed through a single interface by the administrator, allowing the administrator to attain centralized reporting and end user digests. For remote locations, SpamTitan cluster can span geographies to facilitate redundancy across sites.
The recent review in the UK Telegraph summed it up by saying that ‘‘SpamTitan On Demand makes setting up email security much simpler’ and offers ‘instant access to private space in the cloud, which saves money and hardware resources while not compromising security.’ The reviewer was impressed with the overall spam and virus-blocking abilities of the product, as less than 1pc of mail received was spam, there were no false positives and all viruses received were correctly filtered. The Telegraph review praised the solutions suitability for small and medium sized companies highlighting the solutions affordability, scalability and ease of use.
The prevailing trend we’ve seen in product deployment, combined with significant customer feedback, convinced us to develop a unique cloud offering giving users all the benefits of an appliance based solution but without having to utilize their own resources or share cloud resources. Most organizations are now weighing up the pros and cons of what assets to move into the cloud on a case-by-case basis.
The hype of cloud computing is that existing IT architectures and processes can be simply replaced by the cloud. The future reality for IT, however, is a more complex picture. Larger enterprises will continue to have an IT organization that manages and deploys IT resources internally, some of which will be private clouds. In contrast, straightforward private cloud applications like anti-spam solutions will be among the first to be widely adopted by SMEs as they seek to introduce some efficiency savings to limited budgets and relief to fully-stretched IT resources.
