Enterprise Management Associates (EMA (News - Alert)), one of the leading IT and data management research and consulting firms, has released its latest EMA Radar Report, called Hosted Message Security Services Q2 2011 Radar.

Back in 2010, the EMA Security as a Service Research Report highlighted the growth of both managed and hosted security services. Although this is a broad spectrum, only few domains have enjoyed the success of Hosted Message Security (HMS) services. HMS services have more than helped to offload hosted Exchange e-mail security to “cloud”-based providers who can concentrate expertise in large-scale, hosted environments.

EMA was created to help IT professionals find the right HMS services products. Based on key criteria defined by Managing Research Director Scott Crawford, EMA has gone on to identify some of the leading vendors in this space. The evaluations were based on extensive criteria in Functionality, Deployment and administration, Architecture and integration, Cost advantage and Vendor strength.

In a release, EMA Managing Research Director Scott Crawford said, “HMS has long been a primary defense against threats that seek to penetrate the business, and was early on one of the defining domains of ‘Security as a Service. Today, spam continues to dominate the global volume of email, while tactics such as phishing are still a primary tool used by a wide range of adversaries, from the simplest to the highly adept.

E-mail continues to be a vector for attacks that may leverage other ways to exploit internal weaknesses, through techniques such as malicious Web content included in messages,” continued Crawford. “E-mail remains a primary information technology for businesses of all sizes, and even some of today’s most popular social networking platforms place high emphases on integrated messaging. These factors continue to drive directions in the message security market, and place high emphasis on the value of hosted technologies for tackling these large-scale issues faced by organizations of all sizes.”

The HMS Radar Report offers an in-depth and comparative study of services from vendors such as AppRiver, Google (Postini), McAfee, Microsoft (Forefront Online Protection for Exchange), Mimecast, Perimeter e-Security / USA.NET, Proofpoint, Symantec and Websense (News - Alert).

The Hosted Message Security Services Q2 2011 Radar summary is available for free here.