When Lew Wagner, chief information security officer of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, began to build a business case for investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in technology to help thwart spam and viruses, he took . . .
When Lew Wagner, chief information security officer of the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas, began to build a business case for investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in technology to help thwart spam and viruses, he took it a step further than most IT shops. Realizing that calculating the value of reduced risk is a murky arena often riddled with holes and question marks, Wagner sought concrete return-on-investment metrics to boost his argument.

"The ROI perspective comes from the fact that if you have impact against your IT and network resources, it results in downtime and lost ability to get things done," Wagner says.

Spam has been particularly costly. Wagner says the hospital and research institution's 13,000 employees would have received up to 25,000 spam messages per day had it not been for a spam-prevention service implemented earlier this year. In June alone, the service detected and blocked enough spam to account for more than half of all the messages received.

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