Symantec Hosted Services Research Report Sample

The market for secure e-mail gateways (SEG) has matured considerably since the last Magic Quadrant. The penetration rate of SEG capability among Gartner enterprise customers is close to 100%. Few new vendors are moving into the market, and merger and acquisition activity has slowed considerably, as the Leaders quadrant fills up with strategic vendors with broad portfolios and formidable sales channels. Basic spam and virus definition effectiveness is 99% or more for almost all the vendors in this analysis. Although spam detection effectiveness is not perfect, it is within acceptable limits for most organizations, and buying activity is limited to organizations that are replacing aging appliances or are at contract termination.

Although high-volume spam campaigns are getting easier to filter out, one area of deficiency in spam-related functionality is the ability to detect highly targeted phishing attacks. Most solutions rely heavily on reputation and are good at catching high-volume attacks, but few have adapted to changing attack patterns that are more sophisticated. Because reputation filtering is responsible for 80% to 90% of e-mail rejections at the gateway, organizations must be careful to protect their own reputations.