14 DAY TRIAL // The percent of companies that monitor outbound emails has risen with more than 50% from its 2008 value, study says. ProofPoint, a data-loss prevention company, has issued its annual study based on 220 company surveys from various fields of activity.
The study shows that, in a shaky economical environment, data leak prevention has seen a rise in all categories. 51.2% of all companies have been monitoring outbound SMTP emails, 46.2% have been inspecting employee blogs / forum posts, 45.1% of all companies have been following social network employee profiles, while 44.1% have intercepted SMS messages.
Also, P2P networks, FTP transfers, web-based SMS and web-based email services have been monitored as well. Companies have opted to employ monitoring staff members in 38% of all cases, while 32% of them have opted to employ a staff member whose primary job is to monitor all outbound data.
Many of these companies have taken the necessary steps to prevent data leakage by putting in place an email usage policy (93.6%), an ethics policy (90.3%), media sharing and posting policy (72.1%) and a social networking policy (66.8%).
However, all of this has still not stopped employees in side-stepping, 51.7% of all companies having disciplined personnel for violating the email policy and 31.6% firing the employee after an email policy violation. Smaller percentages have been recorded for disciplining and firing personnel when the blog and social network policy was broken.
These actions have still not protected companies from data theft and improper exposure of information, one in three surveyed companies having been affected by these mishaps. This mainly happened because of budget cuts in the IT or security departments (50.5%), IT or security employee layoffs (47.3%) and general employee layoffs, which have pushed workers to take company information with them after being fired (42.2%).
The survey results are available here for further study.