Email is no longer just a tool—it’s your organization’s most targeted vulnerability. As remote work expands, inboxes are accessed from everywhere, often on unsecured devices. With 89% of remote workers falling for phishing and cyberattacks surging 700%, relying on public cloud email is no longer just risky—it’s negligent.
So why trust critical/sensitive communication to platforms you don’t fully control?
The Sobering Reality of Remote Work Risks
Hybrid work was meant to empower people. But for many IT teams, it did something else entirely: it opened the floodgates to risk. No longer confined to secure office networks, employees now access their inboxes from homes, airports, and personal devices—creating new vulnerabilities by the hour.
Nearly 9 out of 10 remote workers fall for phishing attempts (Proofpoint), and remote users are three times more likely to be targeted than their in-office peers. Even worse, 30% admit to bypassing company security protocols deliberately (Fortinet). The result? VPN usage has plummeted by 43% (CrowdStrike), and half of all organizations have reported a rise in breaches due to remote work (Netwrix).
Add to this the human element: overworked IT teams, confused users, and a workplace culture that increasingly blurs the lines between personal convenience and corporate risk. In fact, more than half of employees admit to taking riskier actions when working remotely (Tessian). Your email system—once secured by firewalls and on-premises protections—is now exposed, fragmented, and under constant threat. And unless you’re the one in control, it’s not a question of if, but when.
The Human Element: Why Remote Workers Take Risks
What drives this risky behavior? Tessian’s comprehensive survey reveals that 52% of employees deliberately take greater security risks while working remotely than they would in an office environment. This risk-taking manifests in multiple ways:
- 54% regularly use personal devices for confidential work, according to Symantec’s Internet Security Threat Report
- 41% access sensitive company information through unsecured personal applications, as found in Wrike’s Remote Work Security Survey
The psychological separation between work and personal space has deteriorated, leading to dangerous security shortcuts – Forbes.
The Collaboration Tool Crisis
Public email tools promise access. But do they give you the authority to protect what matters most?
In practice, many organizations find they’ve traded oversight for convenience. A Symantec study surveyed 3,000 workers across several European countries and found that over half (53%) of employees use their personal devices for work when outside the workplace, which includes checking work email. Nearly as many—41%—use unsecured personal apps to access sensitive files every single day (Wrike).
Meanwhile, cyberattacks have surged by an alarming 700%, with email and collaboration tools among the top targets (Check Point).
These tools may serve the masses well, but they were never built for industries where compliance, auditability, and data sovereignty are non-negotiable.
So ask yourself: If your sector demands trust and accountability—can you really afford to settle for platforms you don’t control?
The Shift Toward Private, Sovereign Control
According to Puredome’s 2024 report, 71% of enterprise leaders are moving to private or sovereign cloud platforms—a powerful signal that organizations want control, not compromise (Puredome).
Private email collaboration platforms let you:
- Host secure email, calendars, and file sharing on your terms
- Retain full control over encryption, data residency, and user access
- Align with zero-trust architectures and policy-based restrictions
- Enable forensic logging and fail-safe compliance
The result? Reduced exposure. Enhanced trust. Complete accountability.
If public platforms leave you vulnerable, sovereign solutions help you reclaim control and eliminate blind spots.
Building a Truly Private Workplace
Creating a secure remote work environment requires a comprehensive approach that addresses both technical and human factors. Organizations must:
- Implement robust authentication systems that verify user identity through multiple factors
- Establish strict access controls that enforce least-privilege principles
- Deploy end-to-end encryption for all sensitive communications
- Conduct regular security awareness training tailored to remote work scenarios
- Adopt private collaboration platforms that keep data within organizational boundaries
This final element—private collaboration platforms—has emerged as the critical missing piece for many organizations struggling with remote security challenges.
Meet Carbonio: Private Email Collaboration You Control
This is where Zextras Carbonio enters the picture—not as another cloud-based inbox, but as a self-hosted, fully private email and collaboration suite. Designed to meet the demands of security-conscious IT environments, Carbonio gives you total control over your communication infrastructure.
Unlike SaaS giants, Carbonio empowers IT teams to:
- Deploy email, calendars, chat, and file sharing within their own infrastructure
- Enforce SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and TLS policies out of the box
- Integrate with LDAP, SSO, and multi-factor authentication
- Retain Full Data Ownership
- Monitor access, permissions, and sharing—all from a unified admin panel.
It’s not just private by design. It’s secure by default and most importantly, it’s yours.
Instead of trusting your most sensitive communications to a shared, external service, Carbonio empowers your IT team to own the stack—from SMTP to mobile sync. And it does so without compromising usability, making the transition from public cloud platforms seamless for both end users and administrators.
The Strategic Imperative
The evidence is clear: conventional approaches to remote work security are failing. The statistics cited throughout this article point to an unsustainable situation that demands immediate attention from decision-makers.
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Beyond the immediate financial impact of breaches, organizations face regulatory penalties, litigation, reputational damage, and erosion of customer trust. For regulated industries, these consequences can be existential threats.
Forward-thinking leaders recognize that secure remote collaboration isn’t merely an IT concern—it’s a strategic business imperative that directly impacts organizational resilience and competitive advantage. Those who act decisively to implement private workplace solutions are positioning their organizations to thrive in an increasingly distributed work environment.
Taking the Next Step
Zextras Carbonio offers an alternative—a way to own your email infrastructure without compromising usability or compliance. It’s more than a tool. It’s a security posture, a compliance strategy, and a business continuity safeguard rolled into one private, self-managed platform.
The question isn’t whether you need secure email collaboration.
The real question is: Do you want to control it—or just hope it’s protected?
To read more on how can you protect your business from cyber threats, read this article.