The practice of insecure collaboration

Most often sensitive information exchanged beyond the firewall with business partners and customers is still primarily conducted through email and consumer-grade file sharing tools such as FTP sites, according to a Harris Interactive survey of more than 1,000 IT decision makers in 7 countries.

In fact, the survey showed that 68 percent of global respondents still use email as their main method to send and exchange large files and sensitive data.

In addition, findings also showed that the respondents were very much aware of the security and compliance issues around using email, ftp sites and other consumer-grade file sharing services (69 percent sited malware as issues and 63 percent sited information theft as issues).

This suggests that organizations have not addressed the need to provide employees standardized, secure file-sharing tools for collaborating beyond the firewall.

This is considered problematic in a business climate in which many of the respondents indicated a key part of their role is to share critical business information with partners, suppliers, and consultants (46 percent) and where growing regulations and legal issues will drive compliance challenges for organizations: 55 percent of respondents say they face a variety of government IT regulations and 50 percent of respondents say they face a variety of industry regulations.