Many people believe the future of computing is thought to be moving towards something called cloud computing. The notion of cloud computing is to use the internet as your hard drive.  The term “cloud” derives from logical drawings of a network and the internet is often represented as a cloud.  Those of you that use online calendars or web hosted email are already computing in the cloud.  Services like these  are broken down into three major categories:

1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
2. Platform as a Service(PaaS), and
3. Software as a Service(SaaS).  

An example of IaaS is Microsoft’s SkyDrive.  Microsoft lets you use up to 25 GB of free storage online.  PaaS helps you use programming tools like Java or Python to develop web based applications.  Examples of SaaS are web based email, Google Docs, and our very own secure email spam filter, ProSpam.  The idea behind Software as a Service is to let others worry about the behind the scenes work and lets you as a user just know the software will work.

Maybe one day we won’t even use a traditional operating system on our personal computers to access our software and files or to run applications.  The functionality is already here and user satisfaction is what will keep cloud computing moving forward.  

According to Matthew DeCarlo at TechSpot.com, Symantec has recently recorded that a “whopping 87.4% of this year’s email messages were spam.” This is definitely a large number, and probably prompted an “I can believe that” type of response from you. However, for the sake of comparison, we decided to do a little stat work of our own to see what kind of spam is going through our server level ProSpam email filter.

Looking at Monday’s report, 12,530 messages were scanned. Out of those, 9,888 emails were flagged as spam and bounced back to the sender. This means that 79% of e-mails sent through the filter were marked as spam. For the benefit of the doubt, we’ll up the percentage a couple of points to account for spam emails that weren’t flagged as spam. So at 81% of email messages going through our system marked as spam, that’s pretty close to Symantec’s findings.

Just a little food for thought: out of the 9,888 emails flagged as spam through ProSpam, 23 malware viruses were found. Going beyond the danger of spoofing, fraudulent link, and enlargement emails, viruses are dangerous business. It’s important to have a good server-level spam filtering solution that will stop this stuff before it even touches your computer. Our ProSpam filter does this, so check it out FREE for 45 days and keep yourself protected.