Increasing the awareness among staff of the importance and need for secure email services to keep their machines virus free and their details safe helps increase staff compliance with email management rules and policies across the board. By empowering employees through education and knowledge, IT staff can increase compliance with email security policies.
Email is one of the main points of weakness into any secure work system and increasing restrictions on inbound email can lead to incorrectly flagged emails as spam which are legitimate. This can lead to lost business, lost contacts or even worse, irate customers. When email systems are this restrictive employees will work around them in any way possible to work more quickly, not realising the security risk many other systems pose. With insufficiently robust spam or virus filters, employees can quickly fall prey to scams or worse let a virus inside the firewall.
By empowering employees and explaining to them about the importance of the virus scanning, anti-spam, anti-virus and email compliance measures in place, especially in countries where legislation exists requiring email retention, employees are more likely to comply with the rules associated with email systems rather than trying to work around them. Gmail is a particularly weak point, enabling the reception and transmission of data around email security settings. Accessible through the web, Gmail can be seen as one of the main points of weakness, enabling users to download viruses, files and remove data and avoid the corporate firewall.
Email security is a growing concern with identity theft, fraud and data theft growing problems for businesses. Web based email systems often cannot be completely excluded from internal networks without disabling access to the web in general. While in certain businesses this has become the norm, this type of internet access policy alienates young people, forcing them to go elsewhere and businesses lose bright young talent. By explaining the email security policy and illustrating how easy it is to harvest personal details, introduce a virus or in other ways compromise their own security, as well as that of the company, it empowers employees and makes them more likely to comply with complex email management policies.
As cybercrime increases, businesses are finding themselves continually under attack online constantly. Attempting to enter businesses through one of the weakest points the employees email scammers and those involved with organised crime work through the systems systematically in order to gain entry to closed systems. Once in, a scammer or criminal can harvest all the data they need with no one any the wiser. In fact, once a company has been breached if the cyber criminal is careful, no one is any the wiser and
email security remains compromised.
Email management includes the archiving of emails in order to ensure a clean copy is accessible in the case of any court action involving data communications, contracts or other breaches of laws. In this way a company can protect itself from any legal trouble and employees can be sure to protect themselves with a methodology to prove innocence or reinforce contractual negotiations. Email management is about more than just managing mailbox size and when employees understand this they tend to comply with company policy more readily.
Companies who educate their staff about management and email security issues and policies are more likely to see compliance than companies who don't. By educating staff about the dangers and also the benefits to them personally when they comply with company policies around email, security, management, anti-spam and general email health increases and non-compliance decreases. Additionally extremely strict internet access policies become less necessary and email archiving more accurate.
