Some new survey results came to me last week and took me a little bit by surprise: Out of 830 IT, security, compliance and legal professionals, the majority perceive employees' regular email use as a main source of data leaks. Of all the online activities employees engage in that can create avenues for exposing sensitive information--social networking, web surfing, gaming, application downloading--I had thought of email as relatively safe.

The survey, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by (no surprise here) email encryption services firm ZixCorp, found that almost 70 percent think employees pay no heed to policies for sending unencrypted documents via email. Nearly as many think that employees send unencrypted confidential data to people outside of the company by accident.

The burgeoning use of mobile devices--and the complexity involved in securing them--has increased the perception of email as a major source of data loss, according to the survey.

The reason for ignoring the tools and policies available for protecting data sent via email, according to the survey sponsors, is that the vehicle is so foundational to people's job. "It is such a significant tool that employees are inclined to circumvent policy and email sensitive information, so they can effectively perform their responsibilities in a timely manner," said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute.

That makes some sense. Email is such a quick and easy tool for getting things done efficiently that it isn't hard to see how people focus on the time element of their communications more than the security element. Do the survey perceptions resonate with you, or are they more likely a reflection of professionals on the legal and compliance side?

On a separate note, I had planned initially to use this week's post to explore the prognosis for Hewlett-Packard's enterprise customers under the regime of newly appointed CEO Meg Whitman, but it really is anybody's guess. The general consensus seems to be cautiously optimistic. Cautious because Whitman doesn't come with a background in the enterprise IT business, and optimistic because as former CEO of eBay, she knows what it means to be a customer of enterprise IT. I'm sure some of you long-time HP customers have some predictions of your own, and I'd love to hear them. - Caron