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Viruses can not only close down
an organization and cut it off from the outside world
for hours and even days, involving considerable downtime
and money, but can also erase business critical information.
Spam can result in dramatically
reduced productivity as well as reduced bandwidth. Increasingly
hard to spot and eliminate, it now represents over 30%
of all incoming email to businesses.
Pornographic material again can
result in wasted time and resources, with employees
being exposed to increasingly offensive, unsolicited
material, and even in criminal prosecution for the management.
Malicious and damaging content
can ruin a company's brand and financial stability through
industrial espionage and the leaking of confidential
information.
Calculating Spam ROI
Using the March 2003 fiqures from MessageLabs
Intelligence for spam of 36.3%, the following table
can be produced showing the potential impact on productivity
and the £ Sterling / US $ cost of that assuming
an hourly user cost of £20/$30, each receiving
on average 30 mails per day and taking an average of
5 seconds to read and delete each spam email. This table
does not attempt to quantify other costs such as impact
on bandwidth, storage or any indirect costs such as
employee reaction to the nature of the content of the
spam email.
| Number
of Users |
Lost
Productivity
(minutes per month) |
Lost
Productivity
(per month) |
| 25 |
492 |
£164 /
$261 |
| 100 |
1,966 |
£655 /
$1,045 |
| 250 |
4,916 |
£1,639
/ $2,616 |
| 500 |
9,831 |
£3,277
/ $5,231 |
| 1000 |
19,663 |
£6,554
/ $10,463 |
| 2000 |
39,325 |
£13,108
/ $20,927 |
| 5000 |
98,313 |
£32,771
/ $52,320 |
ROI on VIRUSES
A virus infection can result in a number of
costs:
- Direct cost of clean-up
- Opportunity cost on employee productivity during
clean-up
- Damage caused by payload of virus which may vary
from being relatively benign to loss of valuable data
and even the temporary closure of the business
- Indirect costs such as damage to brand values and
loss of commercial trust as the virus propogates further
from the company to infect others
The following table takes a conservative
view and only calculates the likely direct costs of
clean-up the impact on the internal IT support team.
| Calculating
Virus ROI |
100
Staff, 1 Site, 1 Admin, 2 Engineers, 1 Server, 20
emails per person per day:
Cost of Infection circa. £5,600 / $8,943 |
500
Staff, 2 Site, 2 Admin, 5 Engineers, 2 Server, 50
emails per person per day:
Cost of Infection circa. £38,200 / $61,008 |
2000
Staff, 5 Site, 5 Admin, 10 Engineers, 5 Server,
80 emails per person per day:
Cost of Infection circa. £242,600 / $387,471
|
Even just focusing on these costs
it can be seen that the cost of a virus infection can
be substantial.
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The
Cost of Threats
