New research has revealed that two-thirds of marketing professionals have experienced a data breach involving the loss or theft of consumer information in the past two years.

A survey commissioned by StrongMail and conducted by the Ponemon Institute, also showed that 90 per cent of data breaches went unreported because of confusion as to whether incidents needed to be reported.

The 2008 UK study on email marketing practices and privacy involved more than 900 UK data protection and marketing professionals.

It was also noted that there was a 42 per cent increase in the chance of a data breach occurring when email marketing was outsourced.

"The fact is confidential customer data doesn't travel well and providing it to third parties for outbound marketing purposes can, as the research shows, be a risky proposition," commented Paul Bates, managing director of StrongMail UK.

Email marketing was found by the survey to pose a bigger risk to consumer data security than the internet, telemarketing and direct mail.

According a Computer World UK report, the IT trade association Intellect has stated that rather than outsourcing companies would be better off improving data security processes.


According to a recent survey by Connect, the two biggest IT headaches for businesses were 'everyday hassles with IT' (37 per cent) and 'security concerns' (32 per cent) In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'