7 Reasons Why Personal Email Account Increases Business Risk

Operating your small business with a FREE or Personal email account increases your business risk and limits the ability to grow.  If you fall into this category, read this article to understand the risks.

Two small business mistakes that may compromise your business.

• First, you do all business transactions through a free personal email account.  For example, businessname@yahoo.com or businessname@gmail.com
• Second, your employees use their own personal email accounts to complete business transactions while working for you.

Personal Email Account Risks

Based on those scenario’s, here are 7 reasons why free or personal email accounts increase business risk:

Ownership

Who owns the email in that free account?  Technically not your business.  Since Yahoo, Google, or Microsoft own the email service, they ultimately control what happens to your free email account.

In the other scenario, if an employee does business for your company using their personal email account, you lose all control of the email in their inbox.  If they leave the company, all their email and correspondence go with them.

Privacy Control

If you use any of the free email providers, they control and own your email.  Especially, Gmail accounts where Google makes money on advertising and assistance with marketing to the consumer.

Privacy rights are only controlled by government laws and policy like GDPR and California Privacy Rights Act.

With a cloud service like Microsoft 365 Business Premium, you control company data through data loss prevention policies and controls.

Company Policies

In order to control and secure your business assets, certain policies need to be put in place.  Your company policies cannot be enforced with free or personal email accounts.  Without the ability to enforce policies free or personal email accounts increase business risk.

With a cloud service like Microsoft 365, your business policies will be enforced based on how you configure the environment.

Insider Attack

This one scares me the most, when a business does all their business from one email account.  Multiple employees log into this account for communication with customers or other business transactions.

Please, at a minimum, change the password every time an employee leaves the company.  A disgruntled employee can really cause harm or bad publicity for your business.

Also, with multiple employees logging into one email account, how do you activate multi-factor authentication?  Multi-factor or 2 factor authentication will stop 90% or more of cyber-attacks.

Separation of Duties

In a hosted cloud environment like Microsoft 365 for example, business can setup group email accounts to be monitored by different individuals while the owner of the business accesses all accounts.  For example, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable will have two different email accounts monitored and handled by two different people.  If the same person (not the business owner) receives money coming into the company and handles the money going out of the company.  The risk of a fraudulent transaction increases dramatically.

Retention plans

Personal email accounts are not subject to backup, archiving, security and governance.  Compliance regulations require email to be preserved for a certain number of years.  If an employee uses their own personal email account, the ability to back up the email is gone.

Dispute or Legal Risk

In the event of a disagreement with a customer, employee or supplier.  A dispute or legal situation may arise.  Email today provides the conduit of communication in business.  Lawyers will ask for proof that certain activities or events did take place.  An email trail often provides proof and confirms the legitimacy of the claim.  However, emails in a free or personal accounts may not be recoverable in a discovery request.

Solution

A great recommended solution to reduce your small business risk is utilize a cloud service like Microsoft 365 Business Premium to establish your small business.  This solution will pay off rather than utilizing a personal email account.

Benefits

These are some of the benefits a cloud service platform will provide your small business:

• All company data resides in a controlled environment
• You control what employees have access to
• Sets the business up to sell in the future

 

Final Thoughts – Summary

To learn more about the importance of setting up your small business in a cloud services platform, please read this article by the Department of Homeland Security.

Final thoughts on the topic, as you prepare to grow your business be aware of the risks.  Think through your business processes and strategy.  What is your plan for growth?

Find a technology advisor who will help migrate your email to a cloud tenant setup for your business-like Microsoft 365.  Follow our social media channels for future advice and resources.

Cloudz Biz provides technology guidance and direction with the objective to increase security, enhance productivity and elevate your customer experience.

Do not create a personal email account for small business purposes.