The study exploring how U.K. organisations are approaching data security revealed:
· Data security concerns are escalating – As sensitive and confidential data proliferates everywhere, securing and protecting data is a high priority for 56 per cent of respondents. In total, 59 per cent say that they worry about mistakes from a temporary worker or contractor, up from 53 per cent in 2014. Additionally, 52 per cent fear third party or outsourcers’ management of data (including cloud)
· Customer data is at most risk – An overwhelming majority (61 per cent) listed customer data as the information most at risk, followed by business intelligence (32 per cent) and the data contained within emails or attachments (29 per cent)
· Work to be done to improve security - The top data security solutions in place today include data classification, monitoring and discovery tools, with respondents believing that compliance and security could be improved through intelligent solutions, such as automated user access history with real-time monitoring (74 per cent), policy workflow automation (74 per cent) and automated data discovery/risk assessment (69 per cent)
“As the gap between believing in data security intelligence solutions and actually possessing them diminishes, so inevitably will the risk of data breaches,” said Dr. Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder, Ponemon Institute. “Given the growing business and societal costs of breaches, and the runaway proliferation of sensitive data, organisations need to seriously consider adopting a data-centric security stance without delay. To do otherwise may soon be construed as negligence.”
According to the study, automated solutions for discovering where sensitive data has proliferated and assessing the risk are believed to increase data security effectiveness. The study reveals that 66 per cent of respondents believe such a solution would improve an organisation’s security posture.
“Security professionals can no longer do without a solution that provides visibility into where sensitive and confidential data resides, coupled with visibility into its risk,” said Amit Walia, executive vice president and chief product officer of Informatica. “With Informatica Secure@Source, Informatica provides the industry’s only data security intelligence solution to deliver insight into where sensitive data is proliferating while presenting the data’s risk profile so that protective action can be proactively applied.”