Mimecast, a holistic email management company offering SaaS-based email archiving, continuity and security, has found that 50 percent of U.S. companies are at risk of sensitive information leaks by employee emails, based on a survey of 500 IT professionals regarding their email archiving and continuity policies. The survey underscores the risks companies take such as costly litigation, compliance issues and loss of intellectual property when lacking an effective data leakage prevention (DLP) solution that ensures the security of their corporate email.

Although email is one of the most common sources of internal leaks of proprietary information, the Mimecast survey found that 27 percent of companies couldn’t track email sent externally, 17 percent do not have a DLP policy and 10 percent were not sure what would happen if employees emailed confidential information out of their organization.

Mimecast provides the industry’s only SaaS-based email management service with DLP functionality to address the security risk of email leaks. Mimecast’s DLP service ensures that emails containing sensitive information such as credit card numbers, proprietary information or confidential attachments can be detected and secured from accidental exposure.

Gartner defines DLP as tools used to prevent inadvertent or accidental leaks or exposure of sensitive enterprise information using content inspection technologies.¹ Data leakage is a growing problem that has resulted in significant legal issues and damaged reputations for many companies. DLP not only stops potential exposure, but it is fast becoming a crucial information security control to address compliance requirement. Mimecast provides the only SaaS-based approach to email management with DLP functionality in today’s market. Mimecast’s DLP service ensures that emails containing known data types such as credit card numbers, emails with policy-based content or confidential email attachments can be detected and secured from accidental exposure.

“The hosted provisioning model for e-mail is rapidly gaining visibility,” said Matthew Cain, research vice president for Gartner. “E-mail is evolving in numerous ways… security personnel want greater control over outbound content.”²

Mimecast’s holistic SaaS-based email management is more secure, cost effective and efficient than distributed, premise-based solutions which fail to give enterprises a complete view of email archiving, continuity and security. Consolidating these functions into a single service gives IT departments greater control over their critical email information and decreases overall infrastructure costs by reducing fees associated with multiple server maintenance, disk storage, brand protection and software licenses and upgrades.

Mary Kay Roberto, senior vice president and general manager of Mimecast North America, said, “The survey results highlight the lack of DLP in the corporate climate and calls attention to the importance of safeguarding the information inside a company’s network. Mimecast’s SaaS solution allows companies to ensure that the information that leaves their email networks complies with internal and external security requirements. Intellectual property protection is crucial for any business and identifying and containing data leaks from internal employees through emails should be a key concern of IT professionals when planning their email security protocols.”

The online survey, which focused on how organizations support their email structure, was conducted in September 2008 among 500 IT professionals ranging from SMBs (small to medium business) to large enterprises.

Founded in 2002, Mimecast delivers a holistic approach for managing the risk and complexity of the email management environment with an integrated in-the-cloud solution for archiving, continuity and security of corporate communication and data. Built on a technology architecture specifically designed for SaaS, Mimecast Unified Email Management makes email more useful and productive, removes the fragmented stacks of point solutions, delivers enterprise-grade software services and empties server rooms to facilitate green IT environments.

About Mimecast:

Mimecast delivers SaaS-based enterprise email management for archiving, discovery, continuity, security and policy. By unifying disparate and fragmented email environments into one holistic solution that is always available from the cloud, Mimecast minimizes risk and reduces cost and complexity, while providing total end-to-end control of email. Founded in the United Kingdom in 2002, Mimecast has expanded into the United States, South Africa and Scandinavia, serves more than 2,000 customers worldwide and has seen 300% revenue growth over its last fiscal year. www.mimecast.com

1.) Gartner Inc., “Magic Quadrant for Content Monitoring and Filtering and Data Loss Prevention,” by Eric Ouellet, Paul E. Proctor, June 17, 2008.

2.) Gartner Inc., “Key Issues for E-Mail, 2008,” by Matthew W. Cain, April 24, 2008