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Email Compliance and What it Means To You!

Are Your End Users Educated in Proper Email & Technology Use? Sarah Vouga – Waterford Technologies The conversation started off as a

Are Your End Users Educated in Proper Email & Technology Use?

Sarah Vouga – Waterford Technologies

The conversation started off as a normal sales call into a company- light hearted chit chat evolving into the inevitable sales pitch, telling this prospective client about Waterford Technology’s Email Archiving and File Archiving solutions. I ended that conversation almost taken aback by the bigger issues that businesses are facing beyond just running out of room on their email and file servers.  How do you ensure that sensitive data isn’t leaving your company through end-users emails?

email compliance

Many companies are taking huge measures to prevent the idea of temptation from being turned into action by their employees, blocking access to Yahoo and Gmail accounts in an attempt to safeguard and enforce email compliance and email security policies. Unfortunately, employees, even in all of their bravado and enthusiasm for work and tenacity to do a good job, come up with the solution of utilizing their work email for personal use as well when unable to access their private emails accounts.  This course of action seems like a logical conclusion for people to come to- until lawyers began searching for emails due to a possible breach on a company project and suddenly a harmless email from an end user to his wife about picking up milk on his way home from work, also mentioning of exercising stock options to ensure their personal financials in time for the holidays has now become a huge crisis. The keyword search lawyers were using happened to be “milk”- the code name for the project that had possibly been leaked.

 

Email Retention

But what happens when it’s the company’s head of IT that is inappropriately using company email? Imagine this scenario: the Finance Director of a city government has reason to believe that their Director of Information Technology is abusing his position as well as his company email account. Unfortunately this isn’t an uncommon issue. What makes this a sticky situation is that the people who would need to audit their email retention system have no earthly idea how to do so- much less have no knowledge of even accessing their email archive to even begin sifting through emails.

Most healthcare providers have strict policies around email- specifically regarding patient’s names for HIPAA violations; they always email the patient record # for internal communication. What happens when a patient’s record is leaked and when searching the emails for the patients name and record # they came across a new employee who accidentally sent the name instead of the record #? The outcome of this oversight on the part of the new employee would lead to a huge fine and public embarrassment for violating patient trust.

Email Compliance – The Bottom Line

The bottom line is:  as careful as organizations try to be, you never know when emails might be leaked by accident or on purpose; it is paramount that you educate your end users on proper email and technology use in your individual workplace. Protect your company. Protect your job. Give us a call today to find out more about our Email Compliance and Retention Manager software.