Mimecast is running a 10-question survey to learn how South African businesses secure and run e-mail. As e-mail become more relevant and is subject to more legislation and compliance requirements, it`s vital that all companies start to assess their levels of e-mail security.
Working South Africans spend a lot of time personally managing their e-mail. If the global facts from research company Radicati are relevant, and Mimecast believes they are, we are receiving on average 156 e-mails a day and spending over a third of each working day answering, reading, retrieving and writing new e-mails. That`s not to mention the time the Blackberry and iPhone-crazed executives are spending on e-mail late at night, in the car, sitting in airports and at dinner parties.
What this means practically is that in South Africa, as in the rest of the world, a lot of current corporate information is locked in e-mail. Naturally this leads most of us to believe that lots of attention is being paid by IT departments globally to securing e-mail and making sure that we don`t lose it, don`t send it to people who shouldn`t have it and, most of all, that we can continue to use e-mail even when the server is down.
Research by Mimecast`s offices in the UK and US suggests otherwise.
Time to retrieve a three-year-old message
* 25% of UK respondents said that they could not retrieve it at all
* 29% of UK respondents said it would take days or even weeks
* 50% of US respondents said they either could not, or were not sure they could retrieve it at all
Crystal ball moment
While I like to believe that South African companies are ahead of the curve, I expect that we will reflect the UK`s numbers in this challenge. E-mail has only become a legal and compliance issue in the past 18 months to two years. So, it`s likely that the IT departments of businesses are only now putting policies and technology in place to ensure that old e-mails can be found quickly.
What happens when the e-mail server goes down
* 29% of UK respondents stop all e-mail related work activity
* 63% if IT managers in the US reported they can`t provide continuous service for e-mail if the server fails
Crystal ball moment
Firstly, let`s express shock. E-mail is a business critical communications tool that is taking up over one third of each day and when it goes down, a large part of the US workforce goes to lunch!
Here, I think that South African companies will fair better than the US and probably on par with the UK. Most companies we speak to have a Web mail system that accesses the company e-mail, but mostly this goes down when the mail server does. While it`s likely that over 60% of South African companies have some kind of Web access, I doubt that more than 20% have a system that works if the mail environment has fallen over.
What happens when an employee sends confidential information via e-mail
* 94% of UK respondents are unable to prevent the data leaving the organisation
* 50% of US respondents are vulnerable to data leaks as they can`t track an e-mail sent externally, don`t have a policy or were not sure
Crystal ball moment:
Again, I think that South African companies are very blinkered when it comes to e-mail leakage and don`t have the policies or supporting technology in place to secure sensitive information. I believe that we will see the number of vulnerable companies in excess of 50% from this question.
South African corporates use technology in much the same way as the rest of the world. In some cases, they are even more advanced and it will be interesting to see what our corporate e-mail behaviour is. Please go to [insert link] to participate.
The survey is anonymous and the full results with analysis will be published on ITWeb in the last week of November 2008.
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