Litera's Survey of Mobile Device Users Uncovers Significant Security Risks

MCLEANSVILLE, N.C., March 9, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- 96% of business professionals polled are using mobile devices to store, access and send sensitive material, and the majority are doing so without e-mail encryption or metadata removal, thus posing significant security risks to their organizations.  Companies are beginning to recognize these risks and one third of the IT respondents say they now have server-based metadata scrubbing tools; this according to a survey performed by Litera (www.litera.com), a leading provider of productivity and risk mitigation solutions for legal and corporate markets worldwide.

The 22 question, Web-based survey polled 303 mobile device users (two-thirds of whom work in IT) across multiple industries--including life sciences, financial services and professional services--with the majority of the respondents working in the legal sector.  Some of the questions were posed specifically for and answered only by the IT participants.

The results revealed the extent to which mobile devices have expanded the reach of the office:

• 96 percent of respondents said they use their devices to access business e-mail messages every day
• 89 percent store business documents on their mobile devices
• 86 percent forward e-mail with document attachments at least once a month (30 percent said they do so multiple times each working day)
• 34 percent have access to their organization's document management system from their mobile device

Respondents report using a variety of mobile devices including iPhones®, Androids® and Blackberry® smartphones, as well as tablets such as the iPad®.  While the review and editing of documents is done on smartphones, tablets are generally preferred for these tasks.  Even though just one fifth of the respondents said they currently use iPads, their use is predicted to increase by about 40 percent in the coming year. With this trend, along with the popularity of other tablets, out-of-the-office business activity involving the review and editing of documents that might contain sensitive material--including metadata--will continue to grow. The survey's IT respondents said they were aware of this need for document security at the granular level and had taken steps to address the issue:

• Over a third acknowledged the high risk of sensitive information leaking via document metadata
• 92 percent have a metadata scrubbing solution in place, 32 percent have a server-based metadata cleaning solution (which scrubs e-mail attachments sent from mobile devices)

Most of the IT respondents also saw a need for e-mail encryption:

• 47 percent deemed encryption a high priority, 42 percent a medium concern and just 11 percent deemed it of little importance
• However, only 16 percent of the respondents encrypt all their e-mail while 75 percent encrypt some messages
• 56 percent of the respondents use a server-based encryption solution, 31 percent a desktop solution and 13 percent a cloud-based solution

"This survey confirms many of our suppositions about the mobile device security market.  It sheds new light on the increased prevalence of smartphone and tablet use in the business environment and the degree to which document security, including encryption and metadata scrubbing solutions, are needed to minimize security risks," said Deepak Massand, Litera's CEO.

About Litera

Litera is a Gold certified Microsoft ISV and offers a comprehensive suite of document creation, collaboration, comparison, control and cleansing software that provides users with unsurpassed content confidence enabling them to manage their documents and data with a degree of control not available through any other solution on the market. Litera is the maker of Metadact-e, the only patented server-based metadata removal product on the market.  Litera's professional productivity applications meet the critical content and risk management needs of today's business professionals, including many of the world's leading law firms and major corporations. For more information, visit www.Litera.com.

SOURCE Litera