“Think before you share,” warns Veritas

The new Veritas Hidden Threat of Business Collaboration Report, which polled 12,500 office workers across ten countries, including the UK, France, Germany, the USA, and China, exposed a wide variety of business and personal information that was being shared. It also highlighted that instant messaging and collaboration tools are now being treated as trusted places where life and business decisions are made.

How does the UK compare?

The research revealed that UK staff are slightly more thoughtful, compared to the rest of the world, when sharing data across instant messaging platforms. However, it also reveals much room for improvement – with more than half (51%) of UK workers admitting to sharing business critical data on platforms like Zoom and Teams.

Almost a quarter of workers (22.9%) in the UK have been reprimanded by their boss for their use of instant messaging tools and nearly one in twenty (4%) admit to sharing company credit card details on these platforms. Nearly one-in-ten (8%) even admit to sharing COVID test results.

In comparison, countries like China are much less data secure. 80% of workers in that country admit to sharing business data on instant messaging platforms. Meanwhile, just under half of employees in South Korea (40%) and 39% of staff in the States have been reprimanded for their use of instant messaging.

Ajay Bhatia, GM, Digital Compliance at Veritas Technologies, said: “There are two major challenges with this type of information sharing. Firstly, some of it should never be shared with anyone - no one should be sharing their PIN, for example. Secondly, some of it should only be shared in the right way. Business information that’s shared without leaving a permanent record can cause legal and compliance issues for companies. The same can be true for personal information if it becomes something that you later need for tax or medical reasons – or, worse, if the person you’re chatting with turns out to be scamming you.”

A global problem, needing to be fixed

In spite of the common need to create a paper trail for important decisions, and any reprimands that they might have received for misuse, 79% of employees globally would still share sensitive business information again in the future, although just 51% believe that their employer is saving the data from their Instant Message (IM) and collaboration apps.

In order to protect themselves, 58% of respondents said they are saving their own copies of the information they share over IM. But, in a move that further frustrates their employers’ ability to prove that contracts were signed, orders placed or recruitment terms agreed, 54% of workers are deleting the original versions of their online conversations. Despite this, 90% also said that a conversation using these tools would constitute reliable proof that something had been agreed.

The research shows that the challenge is compounded by the amount of time consumers are now spending using instant messaging and business collaboration apps. Time spent on tools such as Zoom and Teams has increased by 20% since the start of the pandemic. This means employees are now spending, on average, two and a half hours every day on them, with 25% of employees spending more than half their working week on these applications.

Bhatia said: “For millions of us, a lot of how we communicate has changed since the pandemic began. But, like the old-fashioned verbal contract that’s ‘not worth the paper it’s written on’, agreements reached on messaging or other apps, without any lasting record, can be risky for all involved. Each of us, as users of this technology, should be thinking whether we’re using the right communications tool for the job to keep ourselves and our employers safe.

“Our message to bosses is simple: don't fight it - fix it. If a third of all employees have already been reprimanded without behaviours changing, a new approach is required.  Embracing messaging apps and business collaboration tools fully into data management and protection strategies means that organisations can take back control of the data and ensure that they’re compliant and protected.”