Cloud enabled spam filtering services: Challenges and opportunities

The latest trend and technology buzzword in the IT industry is cloud computing. By leveraging on cloud computing's characteristics such as resilience, fault tolerance and high availability, a new generation of cloud based security solutions has emerged. This paper specifically looks at the notion of merging spam filtering with cloud computing and is one of the earliest studies done in this area. Following a discussion of spam filtering techniques and cloud computing descriptions, we look at the potential benefits and challenges for a cloud based spam filter. As an initial experiment, an existing server based spam filtering toolkit is deployed into a commercial cloud computing environment. The results show some drawbacks related to scalability. To address this shortcoming a new model for a scalable cloud spam analysis framework is proposed.