Email - you have risk
Email - you have risk
Despite high profile cases of data loss and poor email management, many Australian businesses still fail to have an effective email retention policy, a survey has found.
Image & Data Manager has discovered that the majority of Australian businesses are placing themselves at risk through their email system. A survey conducted through the IDM.Net.au Web site found that email is accepted as part of a business transaction, yet emails are regularly deleted and lost while no record is kept of the business communication.
Email’s growth has been exponential and the survey uncovered that for 52 per cent of respondents, 50 per cent of their email was internal. When asked by what percentage their email has increased by, 45 per cent said by 100 per cent, 28 per cent felt they had received a 50 per cent increase in email and 17 per cent a 25 per cent increase. The daily amount of email received is also high; 26 per cent of people who entered the survey claim to receive between 51 and 100 emails a day and 45 per cent said their inbox contained between 21 and 50 new emails a day.
Part of the increase is the change in perception: 77 per cent of Australian businesses use email as part of their financial transactions. Yet this higher importance has not been reflected in management and retention of email. Emails are deleted by individuals on a regular basis, with 42 per cent of respondents saying they delete daily, a further 19 per cent deleting weekly.
45 per cent of those that took part in the survey said their employer has lost money due to the unavailability of email services.
Very few emails are printed as official records. 50 per cent of respondents said they print out less than five per cent of their emails, so often no record is kept, whilst 19 per cent said they never print an email and only 20 per cent print out 10 emails. Despite these responses, 79 per cent of respondents believe their company has an email protection system and 64 per cent believe that there is an enforced email policy.
The number of emails lost was also alarming, with 48 per cent claiming that they had lost important emails through technical faults, virus attacks and other technical problems with email.
64 per cent of the survey sample considered the enterprise IT department to be in charge of email, indicating that these departments could be struggling with the size and growth of email and may have not been given the financial and technical resources to implement applications that will manage it. Interestingly, no one felt the records department was involved in retaining email. Up to 20 per cent of those surveyed said that email management was down to the individual.
If these emails are considered part of a financial transaction, it is likely that by losing and destroying emails, Australian businesses are contravening archiving and corporation laws.
”While there is no general provision dealing with the retention of emails in Australia, the Corporations Law requires financial documents to be retained for five years and Government departments, under the Archive Act, need to retain emails for seven years. Clearly these results show that companies and their directors are at risk of prosecution,” said Dr Adrian McCullagh a solicitor with law firm Freehills. When asked if their company or organisation had been involved in a dispute with a customer or supplier over an email based issue, 18 per cent said they had. A larger 42 per cent did not know, indicating that the problem could be worse than this survey reveals.
The survey was carried out in November and December 2002, the end of a memorable year for the destruction of emails and documents in high-profile cases such as Enron and Andersen, as the two companies fought accusations of illegal practices; resulting in Andersen losing its court case.
The Image & Data Manager email management survey was carried out online. More than 240 professionals completed the survey, which was sponsored by Legato Systems. Scott Phillips, regional manager for Legato Systems in Australia believes that Australian businesses are not fully prepared to archive and retain emails with data storage and records management applications.