No such thing as 'free'

In their eagerness to keep costs down, it is not uncommon for start-ups and small firms to exploit free, publically-available resources, believing they get the job done just as well as specialist packages. Yet, just as “free” broadband connections often come at the price of compromised service quality and long queues for off-shore call centre help, there’s no such thing as free business-quality software or IT services, whether for email or anything else. There will always be hidden costs – such as features that need unlocking – and an overall lack of support.

Email is arguably the most common source of skimping. When a hacker succeeded in breaking into some 10,000 web-based email accounts last autumn, it focused the business world on the false economy of using free public services for sensitive transactions. It is worrying, then, that an inordinate number of shipbrokers persist in using personal and other externally-hosted and free web-based email systems to conduct their daily business. Such an approach can, at best, be described as careless; at worst, naïve. After all, a shipbroker’s USP is based on the contacts and information it has at its disposal – so why are these critical assets being put at such unnecessary risk?

While the bigger brokers are increasingly attentive when it comes to data security, smaller start-up companies appear not to consider IT security a sufficiently high priority. Lacking an IT department to drive the issue up the agenda, and perceiving the procurement and installation of a secure IT system as a disruptive, unnecessary and lengthy process, recently-formed shipbrokers are inviting substantial operational risk, with the potential to jeopardise the whole company.

Firms need to ask themselves not only how compromised they would find themselves if sensitive, differentiating data got into the wrong hands, but also how damaging it would be to their business if their email address was hijacked for malicious spam activity, potentially marking their account as untrustworthy. If, as a result, subsequent messages then never get beyond the spam filters, communications and therefore business will stall.

A reliance on free services could easily hamper business growth plans. Once the recession subsides, and new players get a chance to scale-up to their fuller potential, their email and data volumes will rise exponentially, requiring more rigorous management and more intelligence in the way content is filtered, filed and managed.

Whether or not a broker believes the firm to be of a sufficient size to invest in professional IT systems today, the question is where it may be tomorrow. A successful start-up business is epitomised by setting out brand values from day one and starting as you mean to go on – and this includes putting the IT infrastructure in place immediately. Brand values and a perception of being bigger than you actually are (of particular importance when starting out) are hardly accentuated by using free email services.

Those with bigger ambitions and their eyes on long-term growth may be interested in more sophisticated solutions which, in addition to providing sophisticated email management capabilities, can be integrated seamlessly with back-office systems, from standard office and contract editing applications to accounting solutions.

Personal, web-based email systems are only designed for individual and informal use, raising the potential for duplication of work. For instance, if two or more brokers from the same firm are receiving similar information and operating from non-integrated free email services, what provision has been made to ensure that both parties share visibility of email traffic and therefore know the status of a given decision chain at any one time? A group-based email system, by contrast, would enable colleagues to track the status of message threads and related actions.

To come back to the specific issue of security, as this affects not only email but other IT-based activities too, brokers need to ask themselves how their business would have been affected if the worst happened and they suffered a breach. Worryingly, a recent study by SDSD found when asked “is your organisation concerned about data-theft?”, 44% of respondents said “yes, but we have not done anything about it”.

Shipbroking is a prestigious industry and deserves dedicated resources and tools to help do the job. Fortunately, those tools exist, and no firm is too small or too new to exploit them. What they may be, however, is too small and too vulnerable to recover if a crisis hits and they aren’t prepared.