A new study into business practices for handling
sensitive email content securely from
secure messaging solutions provider CertifiedMail has found
that sensitive data is being put at risk because of old-fashioned
perceptions and lack of understanding.
The survey, ‘The Joint Research Report: Encryption Solution
Implementation Landscape’ examined 205 enterprises across a range
of vertical industries and found that over a quarter (27%) of firms
had experienced an accidental or malicious data leak during the
previous 12 months.
Yet nearly half (47%) of IT users did not have the ability to
send encrypted email directly from their desktop and only 45% could
send encrypted email manually through their email client. In
addition, only 13% were able to send encrypted emails automatically
through some sort of policy-based encryption capability.
Even among those that could send a
manually encrypted email, 22% found doing so somewhat difficult
or difficult, while another 44% considered sending encrypted email
manually to be “not too difficult”.
CertifiedMail attributes the view that encrypted email is
generally difficult to use from the legacy of difficult-to-use,
difficult-to-manage and expensive infrastructures that were not
scalable and caused other problems. It argues that even though
today’s encrypted email systems are substantially easier to use
than early-generation systems, the legacy continues to hold true
for many decision makers.
“The results of this survey clearly indicate what organisations
should do to protect their confidential data and their
organisations from financial and other harm,” said Michael
Osterman, President,
Osterman Research who carried out the survey. “Companies need
to deploy an easy-to-use encryption capability that will allow
users to encrypt private content, even content that is only mildly
sensitive. This will ensure that organisations are protected from
the potential loss of sensitive information that could come back to
harm them.”
In a further pointer for the industry as to what it needs to do
to improve the amount of encrypted emails sent, survey respondents
indicated that if encrypting an email were a one-click function
from the email client, infrequent users would likely use encryption
frequently for all types of communications, even those that
contained only moderately sensitive content. Additionally, nearly
half of users would like to have automatic encryption
capabilities.