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Secure Messaging Applications and Services Are Important, No Matter the Field

By Oliver VanDervoort
Contributing Writer

When it comes to messaging applications and services that a business can look at as totally secure, there are some rather limited options. Despite that fact, a recent study of by Infinite Convergence (News - Alert) Solutions of employees in the healthcare, financial, retail and legal industries illustrated that about 90 percent of healthcare employees are using applications to send messages that are not HIPAA compliant.

While the early returns on the report did not focus on other fields beyond healthcare, it’s safe to say that employees in other fields are using the same kind of mobile messaging applications. When talking about the financial world, as well as the retail world, there is a chance that personal information that could be used to get access to money is going to be transmitted at some point.

There are applications that can lead to a more secure connection when sending messages across the airwaves. The growing number of messages being sent, especially in the healthcare field underline just how important it is to find a messaging service that can be relied upon. The recent survey returned a number of interesting factoids. One of those was that email is still the most popular form of communication for employees of the health care field. Those same employees say that when they are choosing a method of communication, 57 percent consider immediacy of information as the deciding factor.

That finding seems to point to messaging as being a technology that is only going to grow. Perhaps most interesting is 72 percent of respondents believe their data is either secure or completely secure when they are messaging. Considering there are few messaging applications out there that are completely secure, the people using these messaging apps need to be educated in the importance in proper security precautions.