* MessageGate audits companies’ e-mail
Most business managers have inadequate information about how employees use e-mail, yet in just about every lawsuit, regulatory complaint or case of intellectual property loss, e-mail use is a factor. In most cases, employees either are simply unaware of their misuse of e-mail or are simply too busy to notice they’ve done something wrong. What would be useful is a capability to help employees comply with corporate policies.
MessageGate is a Boeing spinoff that provides regulatory compliance enforcement, policy management, intelligent message categorization and archiving, and security capabilities for messaging systems in large organizations. As part of its marketing and customer education efforts, MessageGate conducts audits for customers, testing a large corpus of those customers’ e-mail messages (about a million messages).
The goal of each audit is to help organizations understand the content of their e-mail traffic and to help them understand issues regarding intellectual property loss, confidential customer information leakage, and regulatory violations. Here’s a sample of the kinds of things that MessageGate finds during a typical audit:
* Employee Social Security numbers and wage data are being sent to external parties.
* Pornography and other inappropriate videos and images are being sent through corporate e-mail systems. In a typical audit, MessageGate finds that 15% of the message archive consists of audio, video and image files; and that more than 50% of this content is either spam or other material that does not have to be preserved for long periods.
* External parties are receiving confidential business information.
* Some employees are conducting a search for a new job using their corporate e-mail account.
* Some e-mail messages contain sensitive information about legal activity that is currently underway despite the need to keep this information confidential.
* Some employees maintain personal e-mail archives with data that goes back six years.
The examples cited above either violate a government statute, could cause damage to an organization’s reputation or could be used by a plaintiff in a legal action. Complicating the issue is that policy violations often are not the result of any malicious attempt to harm an employer – in many cases employees accidentally violate these policies or fail to consider the harm their actions can cause.
However, if you’re a business manager, these kinds of violations should encourage you to at least review your policies and their enforcement to make sure that potentially damaging content isn’t exiting your firm. If you’re an IT manager charged with managing a messaging system, you should expect an e-mail message from a concerned business manager at some point asking what can be done to enforce your messaging policies.
