With a fascinating email trail at the heart of an industrial espionage case involving McLaren and Ferrari and with Morgan Stanley's email woes last year, it's time to ask whether companies need to reassess how they treat emails.
According to Rob Hillard, information technology global solutions leader for consultants BearingPoint, businesses should abandon person-to-person email for their own legal protection. When we interviewed Mr Hillard last week, he said companies needed to replace person-to-person emails with what he described as "collaborative communications" where many people in the organization were in on the loop. This would be the best legal and virtual protection from antivirus software.
"A person-to-person piece of communication is not visible to anybody else. It is a legal document. You would never consider writing a letter between two organizations without having an appropriately authorized person reviewing it but you don't hesitate to have two junior members of two companies write an informal email to each other that would expose both organization," Hillard said.
We put the interview on our weekly business podcast The Take Two Show and you can listen to it here.
The interview is slotted into the middle of the program which looks at what's happened in business over the last week.
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