According to Proffpoint Inc. data security research, more and more companies are increasingly concerned about a growing number of data leaks. This pushes organizations to embrace more drastic preventive measures. Last year survey revealed that 29% of companies hired staff only to monitor outgoing email of colleagues. Now, the number of companies that employ staff whose primary or exclusive job is to monitor the content of outbound email has increased to 38%.
?Draconian measures? some might say, but, if we take a closer look at the reasons they choose to adopt this strategy, we might understand their concern. By investigating the exposure of confidential, sensitive or private information via email, blogs, multimedia channels and social networks, the end result was generally very bad news.
The number one threat remains the e-mail based confidential data leak. 31% of companies have terminated an employee for violating email policies in last 12 months, while only 26% have done the same last year (for the same period).
Increasing numbers are recorded for the blog breaches as well. If last year 11% of companies reported they have disciplined employees for violating blog policies and 6% terminated some of them for such reasons, in 2009 the numbers have increased to 18% and 17% respectively.
Video exposure and short messages services (like SMS texts) are other channels that companies closely investigate exposure events as a data loss preventive measure.
Furthermore, the research shows that employees leaving the company, through voluntary or involuntary termination, are associated (in 18% of cases) with the leak or theft of confidential or proprietary information. Also, layoffs of IT staff have negatively influenced 47% of organizations regarding their ability to protect confidential, proprietary and sensitive information.
To get back to the e-mail monitoring measure, there has to be specified that companies must implement e-mail policy and Internet usage policy in order to clearly communicate what personal use of Internet and e-mail is allowed at work. These policies must be clearly communicated to all employees and it is also important that the policy is consistently applied for everybody and not just for people the company wants to let go.
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