E-Mail Violations the Focus of Security Concerns

Businesses seem to be less concerned about social media, perhaps because e-discovery focuses on e-mail.

Companies have become very serious about their data retention policies and use of corporate assets, according to a new report from data loss prevention (DLP) provider Proofpoint. Thirty-one percent of those surveyed said they had fired an employee in the past 12 months for violating e-mail policies, and 51 percent said they had disciplined an employee for e-mail policy violations during the same period.

Companies are also cracking down on the use and misuse of social media. Eight percent had fired an employee for posting sensitive or private information to a media sharing site such as YouTube and Vimeo, nine percent for doing so on a blog, and eight percent for doing so on a social media site such as Facebook or LinkedIn.

The survey, now in its sixth year, covered responses from 220 employees at companies with over 1,000 employees during the month of June, 2009. The latest version of the report is always available here for download for free, after registration.

The news comes shortly after the release of a survey that said that the majority of businesses lack written policies for social media. In Proofpoint's survey, two-thirds of respondents had such a policy, Keith Crosley, Proofpoint director of market development and the author of the survey "Outbound Email and Data Loss Prevention in Today's Enterprise, 2009" told InternetNews.com.

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Source: internetnews.com
By: Alex Goldman