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Outbound Email and Content Security in Today’s Enterprise, 2007

Proofpoint

Email has emerged as the most important medium for communications both inside and outside the enterprise. But the convenience and ubiquity of email as a business communications tool has exposed enterprises to a wide variety of new risks associated with outbound email.Enterprises continue to express a high level of concern about creating, managing and enforcing outbound messaging policies (for email and other communication protocols) that ensure that messages leaving the organization comply with both internal rules, best practices for data protection and external regulations. In addition, organizations are concerned about ensuring that email (and other electronic message streams) cannot be used to disseminate confidential or proprietary information.

Data protection continues to be a hot topic—in the mainstream and IT press, legislative arenas and IT professional circles—as large-scale breaches of personal information continue to come to light and as the regulatory environment becomes more sophisticated. At the same time, data protection, monitoring, fi ltering and encryption technologies continue to advance. The growing popularity of new electronic communication channels (such as webmail, blogs, media sharing sites and instant messaging) pose new sources of risk for IT security professionals and the organizations they serve.

This report summarizes findings from Proofpoint’s fourth annual study of outbound email security
and content compliance issues in the enterprise. This effort was started in 2004 when enterprise attitudes about inbound messaging issues (e.g., spam and viruses) were much better understood than concerns about outbound email content (e.g., data protection, privacy, regulatory compliance and intellectual property leak protection).This study was designed to examine (1) the level of concern about the content of email leaving large organizations, (2) the techniques and technologies those organizations have put in place to mitigate risks associated with outbound messaging, (3) the state of messaging-related policy implementation and enforcement in large organizations and (4) the frequency of various types of policy violations and data security breaches.
Over time, this focus of this survey has expanded from a pure focus on email to an examination of other message streams, including web-based email, blogs and message board postings. For 2007, Proofpoint added questions related to security concerns around media sharing sites (e.g., popular new services such as YouTube, Google Video, etc.) which represent a new conduit for the improper exposure of sensitive or confidential information—and pose new challenges for enterprise security policies.

Proofpoint, Inc. commissioned Forrester Consulting to field an online survey of email decision makers at large US enterprises. Respondents were asked about their concerns, priorities and plans related to the content of email leaving their organizations. Forrester gathered 308 responses from US companies with 1,000 or more employees during March 2007. Respondents were qualified based on their knowledge of their company’s email and messaging technologies.

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