South Africa's email risk
A Mimecast SA survey of over 300 IT professionals on their company’s email usage has found that South African businesses still regard email as an operational function – a bit like ordering stationary – rather than a business critical one.
Mimecast says the with 80% of a company’s intellectual property passing through its email server, businesses must take steps to protect themselves. Not only do the majority of today’s employees need constant email access to do their jobs effectively but, due to recent changes in regulations and the threat of litigation, companies must have the ability to present forensic audit trails of retrieved emails dating back several years.
"This survey points out that at least half of SA companies are at risk of non-compliance. Security is still not being adequately addressed and the lack of email archiving capabilities from the majority of respondents is a big concern. The survey confirms our suspicions that staff resort to their private email in the event of an email outage. So much for business continuity," says Garth Wittles, managing director of Mimecast South Africa.
According to the survey:
– 68% of respondents are unable to present a full forensic audit trail and repudiation data for an email sent three years ago;
– 83% of companies are unable to prevent confidential data being sent via email;
– 46% of companies leave employees to store and delete their email;
– 28% of companies cannot retrieve an email sent three years ago;
– 84% of companies are unable to provide users with adequate archiving and a 10-year view of messages;
– 50% of companies’ employees work outside of the office email system once the email server goes down;
Wittles says that the cost of managing email is increasing. "We found that a staggering 82% of respondents said the costs of email security, archival and continuity had gone up in the past two years and yet, via this survey, there is wide spread acknowledgement that their systems remain unable to address some of the basic compliance and security needs of the business," he says.
Wittles says that 28% of respondents couldn’t retrieve a three-year old email at all and, while 36% of respondents could do it in minutes, this number was reduced within smaller companies with less than 500 seats. This implies that enterprise customers are better prepared to meet compliance standards.
"The answers to this question revealed that 22% of respondents can trace an email in hours and 15% in days. We assume that this 37% are still using tape back-ups which is a security and archiving risk all of its own.
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