If you believe your company is handling email security without any problems, the odds are you’re sadly mistaken. A recent Mimecast survey of IT security professionals found that 65% of them felt that their organization wasn’t capable of handling email-based cyber-attacks. A full third of them felt that their email was actually less secure than it was five years ago.
Here are some other critical findings the survey revealed:
- The organizations that felt their email was secured thought email was their greatest vulnerability.
- The least confident organizations tended to use Microsoft Exchange Mail Server 2010, an outdated version of the software that is no longer fully supported by Microsoft.
- The smaller an organization was, the more threatened they were by their email security.
- 28% of the IT professionals surveyed said their organization had recently encountered an email breach or hack, but still weren’t prepared for the next incident.
Clearly, email security is a major issue in today’s business environment. That’s why we here at DuoCircle have dedicated ourselves to helping businesses of all sizes secure their company email. Below, we’ll help you understand exactly why email security is such an issue, and what exactly you can do to counter it.
The Reasons Why Email Security is Still So Challenging
Why is email security still an issue? According to Forbes, one of the biggest reasons is an education problem. In a survey of their own, they found that only 73% of IT professionals thought that their organization was safe from threats. This often occurred, according to survey results, because they were pressured to push projects out despite security concerns or because they weren’t given the necessary resources to prevent it.
Another reason email poses such an enormous security threat is the people accessing it. Consider these statistics about corporate email use:
- Just under 150 billion emails are sent each day.
- The average worker spends a full two hours each week on document-related emails.
- The average worker sends and receives 15 emails with an attachment each day.
- This equates to more than 5,000 email attachments per worker per year.
Your workers are sending and receiving so many email attachments that they become immune to the dangers email can pose. Opening attachments and clicking links becomes second nature, so they don’t think twice about downloading, installing, or clicking any links and running scripts.
Finally, email scammers are getting more sophisticated. It’s easy to not fall for an email claiming to be a foreign prince that’s riddled with grammatical errors and typos. Today, email addresses can be faked to show that they’re from a credible organization, even containing their own graphics and brand colors. Unless you’re extremely vigilant, it’s easier to fall for an email scam than ever before.
How Your Business Can Respond
The first and most important thing you should do is take the time to educate your employees. Take the time to develop strong email security processes and train your staff on it. Send out regular updates with the newest threats and security tips. If you’re able to imprint how critical email security is, your employees will make fewer mistakes and leave you in a much stronger position.
Most importantly, you must have the right tools in place. If you don’t have the right vendors watching your back, it’s easy for threats to catch you unaware. Don’t run an outdated system like Microsoft Exchange Mail Server 2010 that’s not supported and updated for the latest threats. Don’t make the mistake of simply letting employees use their personal email addresses, either.
Your best bet is to work with a partner like DuoCircle. We make your email security and privacy our number one priority. You’ll be able to integrate our spam filtering with just about any on-premise or hosted email solution you use. Having multiple layers of protection is a good way to keep your email from unwanted spam, phishing attempts, and hackers.
If you have any questions or are looking for any additional information, make sure to contact us today!