Why E-mail is a Top Information Security Risk

E-mail information is the lifeblood of the modern organization and is the dominant form of business communications; exchanging millions of emails each day, many containing intellectual property such as product designs, business models, financial data, pricing strategies, supplier agreements, customer or employee lists, and account information. Globally there are more than 900 million business email users in 2010.

Information protection is the mitigation of the risk or damage to an enterprise’s data. That loss can take many forms. One is physical loss of the data itself, either temporarily or permanently. Another is the loss of confidentiality of sensitive data. Still another loss of the ability to be able to use the data because of a loss of access to the data for any reason or a loss of responsiveness in which the data cannot be retrieved for use within a reasonable period of time.

Information protection is a have-to function, meaning that its a cost of doing business, and not a want-to function, which directly carries out the mission of any organization.

Cloud Computing, SaaS and Data Protection Services

A key use of the word service is that is what a service provider delivers, more automatically, and cost-effectively. Putting the custody of data ownership of information in the hands of a service provider raises questions of trust, security, and where the service is “core”.

Rudyard Kipling called his five serving men — who, what, how, where, and when. These are five basic questions to answer when viewing data protection requirements of a service provider,

Kipling's Five Serving Men

Trust and Intellectual Capital @ Elephant

Elephant Outlook protects and manages an organization’s most sensitive e-mail communications against the rising pressure of internal and external concerns and regulations around privacy, confidentiality, and availability.

Our driving goal is to have data always available securely, with optimal performance, to authorized users anywhere via any connection on any device.

Who

Who owns physical assets (such as networks, servers, and storage) or logical assets (such as software applications) is irrelevant from a data perspective. It’s about who owns the responsibility for the data and the process surrounding the use of that data. We’ve worked with some of the highest levels of governments, banks, health-care organizations, who turned to Elephant Outlook for our level of attention, agility, and niche expertise.

What

What data Elephant manages for a client may have many characteristics such as class (production or protection), scope (from a division to multiple organizations), sensitivity (say publicly available to “top secret”), critically (from nice-to-have to mission-critical), timeliness (from relevant to old), service-level requirements (such as availability and responsiveness), and legal requirements (from not needed to mandatory compliance and governance reasons).

How

How Elephant delivers its service is through its infrastructure and its people. “Help desk” support is the most well known element, however people are the key element — in design, implementation, management, and support. We provide operational expertise at a higher level of maturity, sophisticated process management and measurement capabilities.

Where

Clients need to know the location of information for data protection purposes. Elephant has been trusted with the custody and where the information resides and how it moves it around. What information resides where, and where it is made available, is subject to government regulation. Some governments may not want certain data available in other governmental jurisdictions (because the other government jurisdiction might be able to seize the data). Elephant and clients agree to transparency of the data’s location in a physical/geographical sense, at all times.

When

Many organizations need to know when their data will be available and that it will meet their needs. The process to deliver on service level agreements are the ability of monitor, report, analyze, and act. Elephant maintains a higher maturity SLA level with a higher-degree of “trust”.