Failure to Control E-mail Plagues Global Organizations Reveals Orchestria
Wednesday, 21 February 2007
Despite recognizing the need to control e-mail and instant messaging (IM), a majority of global businesses admit that processes and technology to control communication media lag behind their needs, according to a recent survey conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group and sponsored by Orchestria.
Recent corporate scandals and pending legal action have demonstrated the compliance, governance and security risks associated with uncontrolled corporate e-mail, Webmail and IM. Organizations in every industry have become acutely aware of the risks that exist when employees or partners maliciously or unknowingly violate regulatory and corporate policy or expose confidential information via electronic communication.
“Electronic communication control is one of the greatest challenges facing corporate America today,” explained Bo Manning, CEO of Orchestria. “The consequence of policy violation proves disastrous for even the most powerful organization and we see these scenarios play out in the news every day. Organizations need to establish controls which ensure that all internal and external electronic communication adheres to all appropriate regulatory, legal, HR, information security, brand, customer, and financial policies, while at the same time preserving worker productivity.”
As part of the survey, ESG polled senior technology and security professionals about their electronic communication monitoring and control practices. Organizations questioned had 5,000 employees on average and came from a broad range of industry sectors, including the public sector, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, media/publishing, finance and telecommunications.
The survey, targeting multi-national organizations, found that nearly half are exposing themselves daily to an unacceptably high risk of messaging violations related to uncontrolled electronic communication. In addition, a significant percentage has yet to deploy strategies and/or technologies to mitigate these risks. Further, the volume and channels for electronic communication continues to increase.
Companies surveyed reported that their daily traffic per company included:
173,971 corporate e-mail messages received
67,931 corporate e-mail messages sent
95,559 internal e-mail messages sent and received internally
150,944 instant messages sent and received
The issue of control is top-of-mind
70% felt it was critical to control external e-mails
65% saw the need to control internal e-mail
54% want to control IM
53% saw the need to control Web mail
The report also indicates that as much as half of all organizations lack any form of electronic communication controls (automated or manual) that could stop regulatory and corporate violations, as well as confidential information leakage.
“It is absolutely vital that corporate boards cooperate with IT, compliance and legal departments to deploy the best controls for their organization”, said Eric Ogren, security analyst for Enterprise Strategy Group. “Either these groups work together to put a messaging security system in place today, or they face a crisis later.”