Telecom Lead America: 96 percent of business
professionals surveyed use mobile devices to store, access and send sensitive
material, and the majority are doing so without e-mail encryption or metadata
removal, thus posing significant security risks to their organizations, according
to a survey by Litera.
89 percent professionals store business documents on
their mobile devices. 86 percent forward e-mail with document attachments at
least once a month. 30 percent said they do so multiple times each working day.
The survey revealed that 34 percent have access to their
organization’s document management system from their mobile device.
Companies are beginning to recognize these risks and one
third of the IT respondents say they now have server-based metadata scrubbing
tools.
The survey also noted that respondents use a variety of
mobile devices including iPhones, Androids and Blackberry smartphones, as well
as tablets such as the iPad.
One fifth of the respondents said they currently use
iPads, their use is predicted to increase by about 40 percent in the coming
year, according to Litera.
With this trend, along with the popularity of other
tablets, out-of-the-office business activity involving the review and editing
of documents that might contain sensitive material–including metadata–will
continue to grow.
The survey’s IT respondents said they were aware of this
need for document security at the granular level and had taken steps to address
the issue.
Over a third acknowledged the high risk of sensitive
information leaking via document metadata.
92 percent have a metadata scrubbing solution in place,
32 percent have a server-based metadata cleaning solution which scrubs e-mail
attachments sent from mobile devices.
47 percent respondents deemed encryption a high priority,
42 percent a medium concern and just 11 percent deemed it of little importance.
However, only 16 percent of the respondents encrypt all
their e-mail while 75 percent encrypt some messages.
56 percent of the respondents use a server-based
encryption solution, 31 percent a desktop solution and 13 percent a cloud-based
solution.
