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Are your employees using personal email accounts for work?

19th May 2022
It seems like the easy option – let your employees use their personal email accounts for work related stuff, to save you the bother, and the [minimal] cost of setting up a separate business email account. If only life were so simple... By allowing employees to use their personal email accounts to conduct your business, you open yourself and the business up to all sorts of issues, with potentially devastating outcomes. In this short blog, we’ve listed 5 of the key risks associated with using personal email at work, some of which might shock you, especially number 3. We hope you find the list helpful, and if you do, we’d love it if you gave it a share to let other business owners know of the risks they may be facing.
  1. Assets will be in the employees name

Your employees are going to be responsible for a variety of purchasing decisions, vital to the running of your business. To make these purchases, they may be using their personal email, which might appear ok, until the employee leaves. This could then create a serious headache when you try taking back ownership of any assets purchased using the employees email address.

  1. Cyber security is compromised

When you have a company email account, it will usually be set up with proactive antivirus and antimalware. A personal email account on the other hand, more than likely won’t have the same level of protection, therefore if a risky email is opened on a work computer, your whole IT infrastructure could be put at risk.

  1. Data privacy policy's could be invalidated

When you have a company email account, it will usually be set up with proactive antivirus and antimalware. A personal email account on the other hand, more than likely won’t have the same level of protection, therefore if a risky email is opened on a work computer, your whole IT infrastructure could be put at risk.

  1. Data is stored on servers you don't control

When an employee uses a personal email account, your business information is being stored elsewhere, and on mail servers that you have no control over. In short, this means you lose control of the privacy of your business’s and client’s information, causing serious compliance issues, and you have no idea what the data is being used for and where it’s being transmitted.

  1. You give unhappy employees ways to damage your business

Allowing your employees to use personal email accounts in the good times, when relationships are rosy, seems ok, but what about when you fall out, or there’s serious misconduct? The disgruntled employee or ex-employee then has the ability to expose confidential company or client information saved to their personal account, or reveal information that may have serious legal consequences.

And finally...

All the above risks aside, using personal email accounts for business looks really unprofessional. Imagine you’re doing business with a company, and instead of a formal business email address including the company domain name, you’re communicating with thiername75@gmail.com, would you still feel comfortable allocating a large chunk of the budget to that business?

Contact us

If you’re still allowing your employees to use personal email accounts, but would like to make the change to a safe and secure business email account to use throughout your organisation, contact JamCrackers. We’re an award-winning IT support service and have over 10 years experience in setting up and managing business email accounts for a huge variety of businesses, big and small.