KEY POINTS:
It may be too late to save Don Brash but technology entrepreneur Neil Sherratt is building a business aimed at companies wanting to stop embarrassing and costly email leaks.
Sherratt is one of three New Zealand co-founders of British company Saturn IQ, which is tapping into a growing demand for secure email systems that hackers and spammers cannot penetrate.
Saturn's technology is used by more than a dozen British law firms to transmit sensitive information and will soon be at the heart of a network enabling Harley St medical practices to share confidential patient information electronically.
Sherratt and fellow New Zealanders Jeremy Wills and Ken Edmonds collectively own about 34 per cent of Saturn, which was founded in September last year through a merger of Sherratt's secure messaging business, iProof, and a British encryption company.
Saturn believes the global market for the type of "value added" security services it offers could generate tens of million pounds of revenue over the next three years.
The company, headed by former Cisco and Nortel director Edmonds as chief executive, is investigating a public float.
Sherratt, meanwhile, returned to New Zealand last year to focus on developing the Australasian market through a new company, Bizibox, working under a licensing arrangement with Saturn.
An Otago University survey of more than 200 large New Zealand organisations published in August found 87 per cent had experienced IT security incidents which cost them each an average of $452,000 a year.
Abuse of email and virus attacks were among the issues the organisations reported, together with theft of hardware, inappropriate internet access, and cases of illegal downloading of music or movies.
Companies often do not tell the appropriate authorities about the loss of data through email misuse or hacking because of the potential bad publicity, the survey found.
Sherratt said the increasing number of media reports of email leaks, such as the Brash case, had heightened companies' interest in finding a secure alternative to sending emails over the public internet, where they can be stored on several servers before reaching their destination.
There have also been numerous cases of embarrassing internal emails finding their way outside a company.
Saturn was able to guarantee emails sent between registered IQ confidential users could not be intercepted because they did not go through the public internet and were stored in encrypted form only on Saturn's server.
Copies of "ordinary" emails, however, are typically stored on several insecure servers during transmission.
