NYT: Firms Fret as Office E-Mail Jumps Security Walls

I found today’s New York Times article, Firms Fret as Office E-Mail Jumps Security Walls, very interesting and thought I’d share.  The piece by Brad Stone details the growing security and privacy risks corporations face as their employees use free email services, such as Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, as their online storage repository:

“Companies spend millions on systems to keep corporate e-mail safe. If only their employees were as paranoid…

Hospitals have an added legal obligation to protect patient records. But when DeKalb Medical Center in Atlanta started monitoring its staff use of Web-based e-mail, it found that doctors and nurses routinely forwarded confidential medical records to their personal Web mail accounts — not for nefarious purposes, but so they could continue to work from home.”

It seems that every time Gmail releases a new feature, the pundits start predicting the death of corporate hosted email systems.  But the information transmitted and stored within email is the life blood of most organizations.  The reality is that there are some severe security, privacy and retention issues that will need to be overcome before major corporations relinquish control of their corporate communications into the cloud.

[Found via TechMeme]

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