A survey commissioned by email management company Mimecast has claimed that 94pc of companies are powerless to stop confidential information from leaving their organisation by email.
The survey suggested that just 6pc of all respondents were confident that anyone attempting to send confidential company information by email out of the organisation would be prevented from doing so.
The independent survey, among a sample of 125 IT managers, suggested that 32pc of companies would not even be aware that confidential information had been leaked so would be unable to take steps to minimise the damage or track down the source of the information. However, 62pc would be able to retrospectively identify the email leak once the information had been sent, but confessed to being unable to prevent its disclosure.
Fundamental issues
According to Dr James Blake at Mimecast: โThe picture revealed by this survey points to fundamental security issues with protecting not only a companyโs own data but also customer data like patient records or credit card numbers.โ
He adds: โWith the blurring of boundaries between company employees and external consultants, contractors, outsourcers and other third parties, it is now much more difficult to ensure the appropriate flow of information outside the organisation. Especially since the majority of employees are now knowledge workers with access to significant amounts of confidential data.โ
Carelessness
According to Bob Tarzey, security analyst at Quo Circa: โThese figures do not surprise me โ on the whole employees are not sending stuff out maliciously, but through carelessness or lack of fore-thought. Education can help to some extent, but many employees are using communications tools all day, every day and mistakes will happen, so having checks in place makes sense. Affordability of available technology to tackle the problem is also a problem, as most businesses are unable to invest in the high end, on-premise Data Leak Prevention (DLP) products that large business can, so the availability of on-demand services like those offered by Mimecast to achieve the same end is welcome providing performance is not adversely affected.โ
