| Lost White House e-mails illustrate a common issue for US businesses
The survey found that the average employee sends and receives some 170 e-mails a day while at work, and revealed that 33 percent of them use personal e-mail accounts at least once or twice a week for business purposes – 17 percent of those do so every day. Furthermore, 15.7 percent of respondents admitted to using their personal e-mail to avoid corporate review or retention of their messages. According to industry analyst Michael Osterman, president of Osterman Research, “with the increasing importance of e-mail as a business communications tool, the fact that employees are conducting business through outside e-mail accounts leaves businesses with no formal e-mail record of those e-mail correspondence vulnerable to all sorts of risk. This underscores the tremendous importance for businesses to ensure they are covered with a strong e-mail archiving solution that stores, tracks and locates all of an organization’s e-mail.” Additionally, the survey showed that when the corporate e-mail system goes down, 60 percent of employees use a personal e-mail account to conduct business communications. “The question for IT managers is how do you account for business e-mails sent when the corporate e-mail system is down?” asked Osterman. “Management must address how to recover those lost e-mails, because it is certain that eventually the corporate e-mail system will go down. These survey results reinforce the critical need to have reliable e-mail continuity in place to eliminate the need for employees to resort to outside e-mail.” Other data revealed in the survey included a high level of end user reliance on corporate email: 40 percent of those surveyed said that they would find it intolerable to have more than one hour without e-mail, while 11 percent said the same for ten minutes and 4.9 percent for only one minute. www.messageone.com
•Date: 17th April 2007 • Region: US •Type: Article •Topic: IT continuity
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