Potential impacts

• Productivity losses



• Employees can spend too much time sifting through spam e-mails.



• Employees are distracted by inappropriate content and non-work related e-mails.



• Demands increase for human resources to deal with infractions.



• Valid e-mails take longer to receive because they must compete with spam.



• Worms and viruses can completely shut down operations if they infect desktops or mission-critical servers.



• Reputation risk



• Spam, viruses or worms that originate from your systems can damage your standing among customers, suppliers and business partners—even if they understand you didn't send them on purpose.



• A breach of privacy can erode your customers' confidence in your ability to manage their information.



• Exchange of inappropriate materials can create a public relations disaster.



• Hard costs



• Bandwidth costs increase to accommodate unwanted network traffic.



• Hardware costs increase—servers, hard drives, archiving systems—because unwanted e-mails are not separated from valid e-mails.



• Management costs



• IT support resources that could better be spent solving your business problems are diverted.



• The need to build, test and maintain more complex resiliency and continuity plans is created.



• Compliance problems



• Fines and other legal actions result from breaches of contract, or violations of government mandates.



• Intellectual property and competitive advantage threats



• Loss of protected intellectual property, such as patents, research, design and strategic plans can have broad impact, even put you out of business.



• Violation of confidentiality agreements with partners and customers can expose you to litigation.

Five days' prior written notice to IBM is required in order to cancel the Services during the 30-day risk-free period. This service delivers remote email screening only. Other services required to complete a total security solution are available from IBM but are not included under this offering. Registered domain required. Minimum order is 25 addresses at a per address price of $2.00.