Intermedia White Paper Sample

E-mail has clearly become the dominant form of business communication. Businesses exchange tens of millions of e-mails each day, many containing intellectual property such as product designs, business models, financial data, pricing strategies, supplier agreements, customer information, or employee HR data. Globally, there were more than 700 million business e-mail users in 2006 and this is expected to climb to over 900 million by 2010. It is estimated the average business user sends and receives between 500 and 600 non-spam e-mails per week. In a recent King Research survey of mid-market IT professionals responsible for messaging systems, 96 percent of respondents said e-mail is important or extremely important and has a significant negative impact on business operations when not available. Today e-mail is commonly used for communication and collaboration between both internal and external contacts, used for file sharing, resource scheduling, contact management, and is the focal point of collaborative projects for organizations within virtually every industry. With the large volume of messages containing sensitive business and even personal information from every corner of an organization, it is not surprising that up to 75% of a company’s intellectual property resides in email data stores. This is particularly true for knowledge-based and service organizations. These intangible assets that embody patents, trademarks, databases, organizational techniques, and employees’ knowledge, experience and relationships represents some two-thirds of the value of America’s large businesses.

In addition to businesses’ desire to protect the important and confidential information they store in email, industry and government regulations, including HIPAA and Sarbanes Oxley, place external and legal requirements on email security. A recent US study found companies estimate nearly 1 in 5 outgoing emails (19%) contained content that poses a legal, financial or regulatory risk. The most common form of non-compliant content is email that contains confidential or proprietary business information (30%) followed by adult, obscene, or potentially offensive content (25%) and personal healthcare, financial or identity data which may violate privacy and data protection regulations (20%).