The survey also found that almost half of the UK's companies
conducted investigations into email leaks of confidential or
sensitive data in the past year. The figures show UK companies to
be more suspicious of and more rigorous in checking employees' use
of email than their counterparts in Germany and France.
Research carried out by Forrester on behalf of email security
firm Proofpoint found that 44% of UK companies had fired employees
in the past year because of violation of email policies, while 78%
of them had disciplined workers for the same offence.
It found that 53% of UK companies surveyed regularly audited
outbound email content, while 47% have investigated a leak in the
last year.
Companies' principal worries about email 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 convenience and ubiquity of email as a business
communications tool has exposed enterprises to a wide variety of
legal, financial and regulatory risks associated with outbound
email," said the report. ""Enterprises continue to express a high
level of concern about creating, managing and enforcing outbound
messaging policies."
The survey found that, while once firms simply had to monitor
emails in order to know what information was leaving the company,
now there was an increase in the ways that information could leave
a company.
Social networking sites were the location of exposure of
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.
Blogs, message boards and web-based email that is not routed
through corporate filters are all a source of worry to
companies.
Abusing the technologies can be extremely serious. The research
uncovered that 11% of publicly-traded companies in Europe had
investigated the exposure of material financial information via
blogs or message boards.
"The results show that data protection concerns are not confined
to the US and that globally, email, webmail, 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," said the study.
