Johannesburg, 31 Jul 2008
A survey commissioned by email management company Mimecast has found that 94% of companies are powerless to stop confidential information from leaving their organisation by e-mail.
The poll, by global research company Quo Circa, found that just 6% of all respondents were confident that anyone attempting to send confidential company information by e-mail out of the organisation would be prevented from doing so.
Quo Circa questioned 125 IT managers and found that 32% of companies would not even be aware that confidential information had been leaked and so would be unable to take steps to minimise the damage or track down the source of the information.
Sixty-two percent would be able to retrospectively identify the e-mail leak once the information had been sent, but confessed to being unable to prevent its disclosure.
Quo Circa security analyst Bob Tarzey says "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", he adds.
"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."
Mimecast security expert Dr James Blake adds that at risk is not only a company's proprietary data, "but also customer data like patient records or credit card numbers".
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