FrontBridge Reports “Sobering” Effect on Email with Record High Spam, Virus and Message Volume Totals in May
London, U.K. – June 1, 2005 – FrontBridge Technologies Inc., a leading provider of secure managed messaging services, today noted more than 7.2 billion messages were transmitted across its network, blocking more than 85 per cent as spam and rejecting more than 319 million virus-laden emails. Peak spam levels in May exceeded 95 per cent three times. Despite May’s record high message volume totals, FrontBridge customers were protected from the onslaught that brought down email operations for companies relying on non-scalable appliances.
FrontBridge is one of the world’s largest global email handlers, processing on average more than five billion business email messages a month for more than 3,700 companies. FrontBridge’s advanced email filtering technologies strip more than 95 per cent of spam and 100 per cent of viruses from inbound and outbound email streams.
On 5 May, FrontBridge noted more than 180 companies on its network experiencing triple digit increases in message volume over the previous week. Seven customers experienced quadruple digit message increases, with a San Francisco Bay Area printing company seeing message volume increase by an unprecedented 4,287 per cent. FrontBridge experts pointed out that these wild variances in traffic volume would have crippled appliance-based systems which cannot scale to handle swings in data flow. FrontBridge, which acts as a perimeter-based service, protected customers throughout this crisis with its scalable network architecture.
“FrontBridge is tracking an army of spambots across the world that now includes millions of machines, replenishing a pool that had been on the decline for months,” said Charles McColgan, chief technology officer, FrontBridge Technologies. “The SOBER epidemic really underscores the importance of outsourced services for protecting against threats. On-premise software and appliances are ill-equipped to deal with wild fluctuations in message volume and expose companies to significant risk when systems crash due to exponential volume increases.”
FrontBridge’s services are deployed across a unique load-balanced, fully-redundant network of data centres located in strategic Internet locations. The data centres act as a protective bridge between the Internet and a corporate network and are capable of handling any fluctuations in global email traffic. The system delivers the highest reliability, achieving 100 per cent historical uptime and guaranteeing 99.999 per cent availability. Email processing takes place in a fraction of a second, stripping more than 95 per cent of spam, and misclassifying less than one in a million legitimate messages.
About FrontBridge Technologies
FrontBridge is a global provider of comprehensive secure messaging services. Its Total Message Management services ensure the security, compliance and continuity of all electronic messages, with fully-managed services for email and IM archiving, spam filtering, virus scanning, encrypted email, policy enforcement and disaster recovery. Services are powered globally by the only load-balanced, fully-redundant data centre network to demonstrate 100 per cent historical uptime, on top of 99.999 per cent service level guarantees. FrontBridge is based in Los Angeles, Calif. with offices in London, Paris, and Winnipeg. Its managed services are trusted and relied upon by more than 3,700 businesses across the globe and are available through the managed service industry’s largest distribution partner network, including IBM, NEC, Sprint, VeriSign, Siemens Business Services, Inc., TELUS and Equant. For more information, visit us on the web at www.frontbridge.com.