As a luncheon meat, Spam is a bargain. As unsolicited marketing, spam is a rip-off: $712 per employee per year, or $71 billon to all U.S. businesses annually.
That's the cost of spam in terms of lost productivity, according to a survey released Monday by IT research firms Nucleus Research and KnowledgeStorm.
These figures come from a survey of 849 e-mail users conducted last month that found that two of every three e-mail messages received by businesspeople are spam, despite the fact that 60% of companies filter spam. The survey results are based on a $30-per-hour pay rate, a 2,080-hour work year, 100,249,046 U.S. e-mail-using workers, and that e-mail users are spending 16 seconds on average identifying and deleting spam that has evaded detection and landed in an in-box.
While 16 seconds may seem like an extraordinarily long time to ascertain whether a message titled, say, "DEAR BELOVE FRIEND" or "Attention: Winner" is spam, Rebecca Wettemann, VP of Research of Nucleus Research, said that's the amount of time reported by survey respondents.
It is, surprisingly, a marked decrease in the amount of time Nucleus Research survey respondents wrote off to spam in 2004. That year, e-mail users said it took them 30 seconds to identify and delete spam, putting the annual cost of spam at $1,934 per employee.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
There are many network courses that can address your present job's priorities and help you gain the needed skills to keep pace with industry changes and new technologies.
