July 13, 2009
Poll: 61% of IT Pros Say Effectiveness/Accuracy is the Most Important Factor when Buying Email Security Solutions
We just completed a poll on LinkedIn, asking users with IT titles about the mostimportant factor they consider when buying email security solutions. Unsurprisingly, "effectiveness/accuracy" was the number one factor, cited by 61% of respondents as the most important. Click the graphic for a link to the poll on LinkedIn where you can also see results sorted by respondents' job titles, company sizes and other demographic factors.
As several folks posted in comments on the survey, unless an email security solution is effective, its relative ease of administration or other factors hardly matter. Admittedly, the best way to do a survey like this would be to ask respondents to stack rank the various factors under consideration, but LinkedIn surveys currently only support "select one" type polls.
That being said, it's interesting to see that 21% of respondents said that "Ease of administration" was their #1 criterionwhen buying email security solutions. This jibes with our experience at Proofpoint where we find that ease of use and low ongoing administrative costs are extremely important to enterprise IT departments, where IT staffers would much rather spend time on more strategic IT initiatives, rather than chasing down spam and other messaging security problems.
8% of respondents cited cost as their #1 criterion (and who can blame them in today's cost-sensitive environment?). Bringing up the rear, 4% and 3% of respondents cited availability of specific deployment form factors (e.g., appliance versus SaaS) and vendor brand reputation, respectively.
Caveats aside, it's pretty interesting to see this question answered by so many respondents (more than 500) with a pretty good distribution across companies of all sizes. Based on how easy it was to field this survey on LinkedIn, I suspect you'll be seeing quite a few more of these polls in future Proofpoint blog posts! BTW, if you'd like to connect with me on LinkedIn, you can find me here.
Link - Proofpoint survey on the most important email security buying criteria:
