Gaining insight and control in your messaging infrastructure

E-mail is an extraordinarily useful tool, as virtually all of us recognize. However, it can create enormous liabilities for an organization and it can cost an organization more than it should. For example:

• Employees who download copyrighted music and video files and then send them to others on the corporate network can put their employer at risk of legal action.

• Employees who send racist, sexist or other offensive content can put their employers at risk of lawsuits and big legal judgments.

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E-mail is an extraordinarily useful tool, as virtually all of us recognize. However, it can create enormous liabilities for an organization and it can cost an organization more than it should. For example:

• Employees who download copyrighted music and video files and then send them to others on the corporate network can put their employer at risk of legal action.

• Employees who send racist, sexist or other offensive content can put their employers at risk of lawsuits and big legal judgments.

• Well-meaning employees can send e-mail in ways that drive up storage and bandwidth demands unnecessarily. For example, an employee who sends a 1.5-megabyte newsletter in a PDF file to 3,000 customers will consume 4.5 gigabytes of storage and bandwidth; if they instead sent a 20-kilobyte e-mail with a link to the file on a Web server, they could reduce the impact by about 99%.

To address these problems, organizations should do four things: 

1. They should establish detailed corporate policies that specifically define acceptable and unacceptable use of corporate resources – many organizations simply don’t have good policies in place. 

2. They should implement monitoring and reporting capabilities that will enable them to gain insight into what is happening in their network. These systems should provide reports on user behavior to determine if employees are complying with corporate policies and, if not, who is violating them and specifically how they are doing so. 

3. They may want to implement automated policy management systems that will monitor this behavior in real time and take appropriate actions on suspect messages, such as blocking them, routing them to managers or compliance officers and the like. 

4. They should expand these capabilities beyond e-mail to instant messaging, wikis, blogs, collaboration tools and any communications system that could create a liability or other problem.

There are a number of vendors of these systems, including Quest Software, Permessa, Red Earth Software, Softbe and Orchestria, to name just a few of the many companies in this space.

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.