Are you using Webmail for business?

A survey that Osterman Research conducted last year found that using personal Webmail accounts for business is the norm in many companies – 47% of the organizations we surveyed allow their employees to use personal email for business purposes. This is a fairly common business practice when a primary email system goes down, when corporate limits on attachment size prevent large files from being sent, etc. Plus, there are some capabilities in consumer-oriented systems that surpass those of many corporate systems. While some likely use personal Webmail accounts to circumvent archiving or data leak protection systems, that practice is probably not as common as many believe it is.

There are a couple of important lessons that all of us can learn from this practice. First, consumer-oriented Webmail is fairly easily hacked. Using personal email for business purposes is clearly not a best practice from a security perspective.

Second, IT departments need to ensure that users employ personal Webmail accounts in a way that is consistent with corporate policies focused on security, archiving, etc. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with using personal Webmail for business per se, it might not be the best choice for all organizations.