Nearly 50% of UK firms fire erring e-mailers
Posted on: 30th May 2008
Almost half of UK companies have dismissed employees over the past year due to e-mail abuse and over half regularly keep tabs on employees’ use of e-mail to make sure they remain compliant with company policy, a survey has found.
The survey also found that nearly half of the UK’s companies conducted investigations into e-mail leaks of confidential or sensitive data over the same period. These figures show that UK companies are more suspicious of and more rigorous in checking employees’ use of e-mail than their counterparts in Germany and France.
Research carried out by Forrester on behalf of e-mail security firm Proofpoint found that 44% of UK companies had fired employees in the past year because of violation of e-mail policies while 78% of them had disciplined workers for the same offence.
It also found that 53% of UK companies surveyed regularly audited outbound e-mail content while 47% have investigated a leak in the last year.
Companies’ principal worries about e-mail use are that employees could be breaking financial disclosure or corporate governance rules, could be leaking intellectual property or trade secrets, could be leaking sensitive memos or could be breaching privacy regulations.
The report highlights “the convenience and ubiquity of e-mail as a business communications tool” and acknowledges that e-mail has “exposed enterprises to a wide variety of legal, financial and regulatory risks associated with outbound email”. The report continues, “Enterprises continue to express a high level of concern about creating, managing and enforcing outbound messaging policies.”
The survey discovered that, whereas at one time only e-mails needed to be monitored in order to know what information was leaving the company, there was now an increase in the various ways that information could now be disseminated
Social networking sites were highlighted as exposing confidential or sensitive information for 16% of companies while 9% experienced the exposure of sensitive information via video or audio files posted on a media sharing site.
The report concludes, “The results clearly show that e-mail, web-mail, FTP, blogs, message boards, media sharing sites and social networking sites are a source of concern as well as real-world risk for IT professionals working in large enterprises.”
All digital traffic routed through company channels has the potential to inflict damage on businesses of any size and in a number of ways.
If you think that your business would benefit from expert guidance on how to put in place policies to minimise the impact resulting from improper use of company resources, contact Clarke & Son Solicitors today. We’re here to help.