Companies can strengthen their computer networks against hacking attacks and data breaches, but their defenses won’t work as well if employees are circumventing them. Yet companies often unintentionally inspire just such behavior by limiting how much e-mail their employees can send, receive, and store.
That’s because employees who face tight limits on the size of their mailboxes tend to merely work around the restrictions. For instance, they might send and receive files through their personal Web mail accounts or through Web file-transfer sites. Using the public Internet could make it more likely for the information to be stolen, and there are consequences beyond hacking, too: once data leaves a company’s control, it can be harder to restore it after a disaster or to find it during audits or lawsuits.
The employees at the Pump Solutions Group used to have strict limits on how much e-mail they could store because ballooning in-boxes required the company to buy, manage, and maintain more mail servers. But the pump manufacturer’s global network manager, Jeff Rountree, has been lightening up on the policy and might get even more generous. He hired a company called Mimecast to handle the e-mail remotely—“in the cloud.” That greatly reduced the need for Rountree to manage e-mail servers, which in turn could reduce the need for 700 of Rountree’s coworkers to worry about the size of their in-boxes. Rountree likes that idea because if employees face no resistance to e-mailing large files, “in the long run, it’s better for us to let them do it and we can monitor it,” he says. “If we don’t let them send it, we wouldn’t know, because they would find some other way to do it.”
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