You have invested money in employing the best IT administrators to ensure your environment is being taken care of. Your administrator reassures you that your data is safe, and is accessible by your staff only through a bullet-proof direct login structure and file rights. This process is managed by your administrator, who'll fight tooth and nail to ensure the secure data and passwords are kept safe, says Dirk Robinson, Managing Director for Robinson Distribution.
To help keep the outside world out of your data/intellectual property (IP), your administrator takes to task to implement a Gartner Leader Firewall with industry standard rules. He patches all his servers and then loads the best possible backup solution with anti-virus to top it off for good measure. Now your network is safe and you've even encrypted client VPN access to the network, to make sure you don't have data leakage. The administrator's boss is happy and his company information is safe from the rest of the world.
Then the same super administrator reads about POPI, ECT and King III. Deciding that he needs to comply, he starts looking at the options to keep the data local (on-prem) or in the cloud, and decides to send all his mail to the cloud.
E-mails move more information in and out of your organisation than any other medium. When you archive your e-mail data, you basically make a copy of all the items ever sent and received in your e-mail system, and place it in a system able to recover items through e-discovery. When you decide to move this information to the cloud, you lose control over the data, and the data now gets looked after by the company you contract. Now, not only did you give a company in another country access to the most inner workings of your company, you also made it possible for them to sell that information to the highest bidder without your knowledge. Yes, the salesman said it will be safe, no one will ever be able to see your information (except the supplier's staff and whomever broke into the system). They also told you that you will get a 100% SLA, see more.
Now, the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPI) states you are responsible for keeping the information safe and confidential. So who is responsible when the data is lost? Sorry to say, but the buck stops with you, the e-mail owner.
Why would you go through all the effort to make a secure environment if you're going to send it to the cloud, and why would you waste time and money on a local administrator when you can just get a wireless link to the Internet?
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