Email is a major security threat.
While restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and sports stadiums are now open to full capacity and our overall social lives are returning to normal, our work lives have changed.
More than ever before, we are working, buying and selling, and networking virtually.
With this new normal, ransomware and overall cybercrime are on the rise and Internet security is more important than ever.
In fact, a recent NPR article, “U.S. Suffers Over 7 Ransomware Attacks an Hour. It’s Now a National Security Risk” states that the United States suffered 65,000 ransomware attacks last year and that the number will grow this year!
While the article details several factors behind this rise (such as profitability, aging IT security systems, and vulnerability of home networks), our reliance on email as a business tool is also a major contributing factor.
As detailed in the Ten Perils of Using Email for Task Management, email is a major security threat:
Not only is over-reliance on email a security risk, but it is also inefficient. Email was designed in the early 1970s as a communications tool. These days, organizations rely on email for mission-critical activities such as task management, document management, and even project management.
What makes email inefficient is the lack of transparency. Information and documents included in email are available to just those people on the distribution list. Furthermore, when employees leave an organization, it is expensive and time-consuming to extract their work experiences (such as questions asked and answered), documents, and tasks from email inboxes.
Making an organizational choice to use email for informal communications only and choosing modern solutions for business-critical activities is an important step towards improving security against ransomware and driving overall employee productivity.
To take it a step further, selecting task management and document management solutions that plug into a secure, state-of-the-art Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, like ServiceNow, will further reduce reliance on in-house IT systems for protection against cyber thieves.
We are here to help. For more information about getting your tasks and documents out of email, check out the Tasker Suite, built on the Now platform.
