Lost White House Emails Also Common Issue For U.S. Businesses
New Survey Reveals One-Third of Employees Use Personal Email Once or Twice a Week for Business Purposes; Nearly 60% Use Personal Email at Work When Email is Down
Austin, TX – April 16, 2007 – The current White House scramble to locate and provide historical emails for legal discovery is also a common and growing problem for U.S. businesses, revealed a new survey conducted by Osterman Research, Inc., sponsored by MessageOne. The survey, conducted this month, strongly suggests that corporate email storage and retrieval is not well managed and with increasing legal requests for email, that businesses and management are at risk.
The MessageOne Survey of Rogue Email Practices, by independent email research firm Osterman Research, included interviews with employees working in medium and large sized U.S. businesses around the country. The survey found that the average employee sends and receives some 170 emails a day while at work, and revealed that 33% of them use personal email accounts at least once or twice a week for business purposes – 17% of those do so every day. Furthermore, 15.7% of respondents admitted to using their personal email to avoid corporate review or retention of their messages.
According to industry analyst Michael Osterman, President of Osterman Research, “With the increasing importance of email as a business communications tool, the fact that employees are conducting business through outside email accounts leaves businesses with no formal email record of those emails, making them vulnerable to all sorts of risks. This underscores the tremendous importance for businesses to ensure they are covered with a strong email archiving solution that stores, tracks and locates all of an organization’s email.”
Additionally, the survey showed that when the corporate email system goes down, 60% of employees use a personal email account to conduct business communications. “The question for IT managers is how do you account for business emails sent when the corporate email system is down,” asked Osterman. “Management must address how to recover those lost emails, because it is certain that eventually the corporate email system will go down. These survey results reinforce the critical need to have reliable email continuity in place to eliminate the need for employees to resort to outside email.”
MessageOne, the sponsor of the survey, is the leading provider of managed services for email management, archiving and business continuity. “As email use has really taken off, we have observed a growing disconnect between executives, IT management and employees about how and when email is used, tracked and stored,” explained MessageOne President and CEO Satin Mirchandani. “It is time for all organizations to gain control of email management, including email continuity and archiving. With best of class email archiving, businesses can proactively control message retention and deletion in accordance with government regulations.”
Other data revealed in the survey included a high level of end user reliance on corporate email: 40% of those surveyed said that they would find it intolerable to have more than one hour without email, while 11% said the same for ten minutes and 4.9% for only one minute.
About MessageOne
Headquartered in Austin, Texas, MessageOne is the leading provider of managed services for email management, archiving and business continuity. For enterprise email and wireless messaging systems, the company’s Email Management Services (EMS™) provides comprehensive email archiving, storage management and e-Discovery with the total continuity, recovery, and security protection only available from a managed service. In addition, MessageOne’s AlertFind™ provides guaranteed emergency notification and escalation to help companies protect their employees during any crisis or disaster. Millions of users around the world depend on MessageOne for its award-winning managed services.
About Osterman Research
Osterman Research was founded by Michael Osterman in 2001. Since that time, the company has become one of the leading analyst firms in the messaging and collaboration space, providing research, analysis, white papers and other services. The core of Osterman Research's capabilities is its market research panel of IT professionals and end users that are regularly surveyed on a variety of topics related to email, instant messaging, spam, collaboration, security, storage, archiving, data retention, compliance and other areas.
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For more media information, contact:
Paul D'Arcy
Phone: 512-652-4500
Email: paul_darcy@messageone.com
Kirstan Ryan
Phone: 512-652-4500
Email: kirstan_ryan@messageone.com
