Nearly four in ten companies have staff whose main job is to monitor the outgoing email of colleagues, according to US data security research. More than a third of the companies surveyed hired staff to perform only that monitoring function.
Email security company Proofpoint interviewed email chiefs at 220 companies which employed more than 1,000 people. It found that companies were so worried about employees leaking information via email that 38% of them paid other employees to monitor communications.
"An increasing number say they employ staff to read or otherwise analyze the contents of outbound email (38 percent, up from 29 percent in 2008)," said a Proofpoint statement. "The pain of data leakage has become so acute in 2009 that more US companies report they employ staff whose primary or exclusive job is to monitor the content of outbound email (33 percent, up from 15 percent in 2008)."
The survey suggested that companies have reason to be careful. Proofpoint said that 43% of the companies told it that they had investigated email leaks of confidential information in the past year. "Nearly a third [of companies], 31 percent, terminated an employee for violating email policies in the same period (up from 26 percent in 2008)," said Proofpoint's statement.
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