Against a backdrop of growing online privacy concerns in the United States, a new report issued on Monday said that corporations in both the United States and the United Kingdom are growing increasingly skittish about messaging security.
The study, commissioned by Proofpoint, a Cupertino, California-based email security systems startup, found that 38 percent of companies with 1,000 employees or more hired staff to read or analyze their outbound email.
That proportion jumped to 44 percent among companies with more than 20,000 employees in the survey, which was fielded by Forrester Consulting.
While the major concern among corporations revolved around employees exposing content that puts the companies at legal, financial, or regulatory risk, companies are also concerned about the exposure of embarrassing information.
In the past year, there has been a storm brewing in the U.S. capital over the government’s monitoring of emails and phone calls. Only last week U.S. law enforcement met with the largest ISPs in the U.S. to request a fairly dramatic change in online data retention rules.
Currently ISPs retain the records of customers’ online activity for only a few weeks, but the government wants ISPs to keep those records for two years (see DOJ Outlines Data Needs).
More Investigations
More than one in three companies investigated an email leak in the past year while a little more than that, 36.4 percent, investigated at least one violation of data protection or privacy regulations in the past 12 months.
The findings naturally help four-year-old Proofpoint, which was started by Eric Hahn, the former chief technology officer of Netscape. The company markets message security servers and appliances that offer corporations an overview of incoming and outgoing messaging content.
Proofpoint has received $58 million in five rounds of funding from Benchmark Capital, Bridgescale Ventures, Inventures Group, JAFCO Ventures, Meritech Capital Partners, RRE Ventures, StanfordUniversity, and Mohr, Davidow Ventures.
“The study was done by Forrester, which surveyed IT decision makers at 300 large corporations. It checks the temperature of large companies,” said Andy Murphy, a spokesperson for Proofpoint.
The study also found that corporations are concerned about other corporate communications outlets such as message boards and blogs. A whopping 55.4 percent said they are concerned about FTP (file transfer protocol), IM (instant messaging), peer-to-peer networks, and blogs.
More than 17 percent of the surveyed companies said they had disciplined an employee for violating blog or message board policies in the last 12 months. About 7 percent said they had fired an employee for blog or message board infractions in the past year.
Employee Termination
The incidence of employee termination was much higher for email violations. Almost a third of companies, 31.6 percent, said they had terminated an employee for violating email policies in the past 12 months. About half, or 52.4 percent, disciplined an employee for violating email policies.
Corporations estimated that about 22.8 percent of their outgoing emails include content that puts the companies at some risk. About a third, 34.7 percent, said their businesses have experienced at least one incident of exposure of either sensitive or embarrassing information in the last year.
About a fifth of companies surveyed, 21.1 percent, were affected by improper exposure or theft of customer information, while 15 percent were impacted by improper exposure or theft of intellectual property.
One quarter of the companies, or 25.2 percent, were ordered by a court or regulatory body to produce employee email in the last year.
Contact the writer: CMedford@RedHerring.com