Email is a part of everyday life. It should come as no surprise, then, that it is widely used in corporate environments. Many believe that email will not be around for much longer due to the adoption of social media, text and instant messaging and other unified communication system features. However, a recent report from Osterman Research suggested the contrary, but also found that email will evolve in many ways to deliver increased ability to collaborate. The changing status of email calls for more security and protection of employees' personal information and corporate data.
Email is very much alive, as Osterman Research's study discovered that a typical email user sends an average of 30 emails during a typical workday and receives more than three times that. When expanding those numbers to a yearly level, the researchers identified that companies with over 5,000 employees send and receive more than 165 million email messages. Email is not even close to dying, as 52 percent of surveyed professionals stated that they send more emails now than they did 12 months ago and 44 percent of survey respondents told researchers that they dispatch the same number of emails compared to a year ago.
If email is used less, its contents become more important
Some organizations are trying to reduce their use of email in the enterprise environment. PC Magazine reported that the multinational corporation Atos made plans three years ago to reduce its need for email. The experiment worked, as the company decreased the number of sent and received emails by 60 percent. Rather than sending confirmations and asking enterprise-wide questions, email at the firm is only used for the most important tasks.
By reducing the number of emails, the importance of what they contain will increase - and, in turn, create challenges associated with protecting the information contained within. Atos CEO Thierry Breton told PC Magazine that the enterprise lowered the number of internal emails received per employee every week to around 25. Now, Breton stated that email is used for human resources and legal matters. The topic-specific reliance on email means that email encryption will not only be more common, but almost become a necessity.
The reliance on encrypted emailalso affects enterprises that do not reduce their internal email rates. The Osterman Research report found that email is used for sending attachments by 94 percent of users and for sharing files while on a call for 60 percent of users. This suggests that collaboration tools are falling by the wayside next to email. Because of email's prevalence in the average employee's life, it is far more productive, efficient and secure to send an email with an attachment than to upload a file to a database before emailing the respondent anyway.
Finding a middle ground between security and productivity
Whether business leaders decide to cut down on email or not, the effect that email has on business is profound. From collaboration to communication, email will stick around for a long time. However, as email's use becomes more focused on important business matters, the means to protect the documents and messages attached will only become more crucial to the short- and long-term success of an organization. After all, email encryption is already popular across healthcare and finance industries in which (HIPAA) Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act compliance is required.
As encrypted email grows as an enterprise trend, security features need to be complemented by easy-to-use tools. This will ensure that employees remain productive while corporate and personal data remains safe. The best way to simplify email encryption would be through integration with existing clients. Employees will be less likely to forget to perform encryption and more likely to remain HIPAA-compliant during collaboration and communication with co-workers.
David Bailey is Senior Vice President at Protected Trust.
Protected Trust is a sponsor of the Print4Pay Hotel. I urge members and readers to visit their site to see their full line of products and services. More and more we need to provide well rounded strategic solutions for our customers. Protected Trust offers some unique solutions that can help us in our day to day efforts. Check them out here.
Comments (0)