A survey of 400 small and medium sized business found that spam and malware infections have grown dramatically from 2006 to 2007.

In January 2006, 64% of emails received by small businesses were spam. By December 2006, the number grew to 85%. Not surprisingly, the number of spam bot infections within small companies grew from 15% to 40% during the same time period.

The findings highlight the need for enterprise grade security solutions for small companies. Small Businesses have two options:

1) Utilize an professional hosted email service that has industrial strength security, or

2) Manage email in-house and utilize an industrial strength email security service.

An inordinate number of Small businesses remain very vulnerable to the growing number and complexity of messaging threats. The cost of not plugging security holes, even for micro businesses, is far greater than the cost of implementing an appropriate solution.