Digital information is not only easy to store but also to share. Companies must decide what information is valuable and must be kept secret, and how best to do so.
It's not uncommon to hear of high profile companies experiencing data security breaches in recent times. These events not only bring into question the company's credibility and reliability but can expose a business to unnecessary costs and have lengthy and devastating legal ramifications.
Security a priority
According to the Global State of Information Security Survey 2007 only half of all companies have a policy that address the protection, disclosure and destruction of data. And, According to the 2013 Cost of a Data Breach study, negligence and system glitches together accounted for 64 percent of data breaches last year. These can include employees mishandling information, violations of industry and government regulations, inadvertent data dumps, stolen laptops, and wrongful access.
What’s to stop a disgruntled employee from leaking your customer database or your IP that is your competitive advantage? What happens if an employee leaves? Are they forwarding all their work onto a private email and in so doing, your assets? Insiders greatly contribute to data breaches. What’s even more concerning is that it is likely that these trusted insiders don’t know they’re doing something wrong.
A large percentage of employees think it is acceptable to send corporate information outside the company on personal devices and cloud services. And it’s not uncommon for this data to never be deleted, leaving it vulnerable to data leaks.These breaches caused by human error can be significant. At $159 per compromised record in the United States ($117 globally), the mistakes made by trusted employees are costing enterprises a lot of money. While the cost of a data breach can vary widely because of the types of threats and data protection laws, the financial consequences are serious worldwide.
As the prevalence of technology continues to grow so does the number of touch points that employees have to company information. They can not only access it from their work computer but from their smart phones, tablets and on public internet and WiFi facilities. Employees are entrusted with confidential and sensitive information. What if that information gets in the wrong hands?
Prevention is better than cure
MailGuard is the no.1 security provider in cloud based technology with applications that sits at the edge of a firm's network and inspects the outgoing data traffic. If it detects sensitive information, it can quarantine the email and alert the administrator. If you are protected by MailGuard’s triple-layered email filtering you can implement outbound (and inbound) email policies which allows a company to restrict the following:
- Attachment types ie Excel, PDF, audio files etc
- Filenames
- Sender
- Recipient
- Subject
- Message content
Email filtering is just one way of blocking valuable information from leaving the company but for data loss prevention to be effective, companies must decide on the right strategy, engage the right people, target the right data, and employ the right technology.
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