Johannesburg, 11 Dec 2008
Mimecast SA and ITWeb have released survey findings which reveal curbing malware, archiving and preventing information leaks are the biggest e-mail challenges facing South African companies.
The nine-question survey was published on ITWeb and 308 respondents participated online. The survey aimed to determine SA's level of e-mail archiving, governance and compliance.
The survey reveals 44% of companies claim they have difficulty in blocking spam, viruses and malware, and 41% say managing e-mail storage volumes is a huge challenge.
Barry Gill, Mimecast product development manager, says: “There's not enough attention being placed by companies on e-mail.
“We found that South African companies are not effectively utilising the e-mail data. Companies need to put in place strategic retention and governance policies, which could save an organisation a considerable amount of money. The results found in the South African survey are much on par with the survey we did in the UK.
“Unfortunately, e-mail is still considered an operational issue rather than being seen as a business-critical issue. I'm not saying the company needs to act as a Big Brother; however, tools need to be put in place to protect the brand of the business.
“E-mail is an asymmetric communications tool and it's vital that companies monitor the number of messages that clog the system and take large amounts of storage. From an e-discover point of view, it becomes a mammoth task to sift through all those messages.”
Grey areas
According to Mimecast, 28% of companies cannot retrieve an e-mail that was sent three years ago, while 36% claimed they could do so within minutes.
Gill points out: “Legislation has not been particularly stringent on storage requirements. There are a lot of grey areas with regulations, and only after the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act was put in place are we starting to see organisations moving towards real e-mail archiving systems. It's an expensive and complex process to store and archive data.”
Mimecast says that e-mail must be easy to find as it's often a company's defence in litigation. In addition, the survey found that 68% of companies would not be able to present a full forensic data of an e-mail from three years ago.
Gill notes: “If a company does not store forensic data and if it's shown that the emails could have been edited and tampered with, then the information becomes useless in a legal situation.”
Mimecast says 84% of users cannot view 10 years of e-mail history within their Outlook account. Gill says these are concerning numbers and proves that companies need to govern information more seriously.
In the event that the e-mail server fails unexpectedly, 30% of companies claim another e-mail server will kick in, while 29% say they have a disaster recovery service in place. It was discovered that 28% of employees will use their personal e-mail accounts for communicating during the downtime.
Data leakage
According to Gill, this is problematic as open e-mail services, such as Google's Gmail and Yahoo, have a high risk of data leakage as the information is open to the world and the user completely bypasses the organisation's security measures.
According to Mimecast, companies are exposing themselves to risk of internal leaks of sensitive information, with 84% of leaked data being sent without management knowledge. In a similar survey conducted by Mimecast in the UK, 94% of companies were found to be unable to stop a confidential message leaving the company network.
Almost 50% of companies say they allow the user to decide what to store and what to delete, while only 37% of IT departments manage and enforce e-mail retention policies.
Gill says: “A few years ago, the average e-mail being sent would be 2Kb to 3Kb, and we are now seeing, on average, e-mail sizes of 148Kb. As the Internet is becoming more accessible and especially with the new broadband cables coming in next year, more e-mails are being sent out with larger file attachments and companies are struggling to keep up with the storage environment.”
Mimecast believes companies are recognising the importance of e-mail archiving, continuity and security, but notes that 27% of companies claim the cost of e-mail security, archival and continuity has more than doubled versus two years ago.
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Related story:
Survey probes e-mail compliance
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