Corporate email: A portal to potential disaster

Email continues to be a huge source of risk to enterprises. Proofpoint, an email security and data loss prevention company, released its fourth-annual study of outbound email and content security issues recently. The company obviously has a horse in this race, but nevertheless, the numbers are fairly interesting.

Respondents estimated that nearly 20 percent of all outbound email poses a legal, regulatory or financial risk. More than a third of surveyed companies investigated a suspected email leak of confidential or proprietary information in the past 12 months. Other findings: more than one-quarter of surveyed companies (27.3 percent) have terminated employees for violating email policies in the past 12 months, while 45.5 percent have disciplined employees for violating email policies during the past year. 29.1 percent of the largest enterprises (20,000 employees or more) reported that employee email was subpoenaed in the last 12 months. To counter these threats, a significant number of companies are hiring staff specifically to read or analyze the contents of outbound email.

For the full report:
- see this press release