We recently conducted a survey for FaceTime Communications to determine how well organizations are protected against information leaks. Here's some of what we found:

• Only 38% of organizations believe that they are adequately or very adequately protected against data leaks that might occur in their e-mail systems and only a third are protected against leaks that might occur through instant messaging systems. Organizations are only slightly more protected against leaks that might occur in their unified communications infrastructure.

• Organizations are even more concerned about unintentional or accidental data leaks that might occur as employees are rushed, forget corporate policies, and forward sensitive data in an e-mail unintentionally, etc. Nearly one-half of organizations are concerned about these data leaks, which they perceive to be even more serious than intentional data breaches or data stolen by malware, such as keystroke loggers.

• With regard to data leaks in current or future unified communications systems, 11% of organizations consider information leak protection to be a top priority, while another 38% plan to address the issue.

Data leaks (Compare Data Leak Protection products) are an important problem that many organizations have not yet adequately addressed – they will become more of a problem in the future as unified messaging and unified communications create more opportunities for data leaks to occur. 

However, one of the problems with data leaks is that very often they go undetected. If a keystroke logger gets installed on a PC in your network, it will likely go undetected for some time unless the technology is in place to detect it. If users mistakenly send confidential data through e-mail, instant messaging or other systems, that practice will continue indefinitely until someone catches on. If someone is bound and determined to leak data intentionally, they might never be caught until a data loss prevention (DLP) system has been deployed.

In response, organizations of all sizes should deploy whatever form of DLP is appropriate. While the problem might be theoretical for many companies right now, data loss will happen to virtually every company at some point.

Michael Osterman is principal analyst of Osterman Research.