Eighty-five percent of organisations have experienced a data breach in the past 12 months — up slightly from 84 percent a year ago, according to the fourth-annual encryption trends study recently released by the Ponemon Institute. The study of 997 IT business managers, analysts and executives in the U.S. also found that 22 percent of organisations have experienced at least five security breaches within the past year — a rise from 13 percent of respondents last year.
The report summarizes key findings from the study that included nearly 1000 U.S.-based enterprise IT leaders, analysts and executives. A similar study conducted with UK based IT leaders shows very similar results.
Encryption of data on mobile data-bearing devices used by employees is very important or important.
More than 59 percent of respondents say it is very important or important to encrypt employees’ mobile devices – a sign that organizations recognize that reality that valuable data is more mobile than ever.
More than 70% have fully executed or just launched data encryption strategy in their organization.
Once again data encryption strategies are being implemented across a majority of the respondent participants. The majority of organisations, 78 percent, have some type of encryption strategy, up from 74 percent in 2008 and from 66 percent in 2007.
However, this survey data is quite misleading. Most of the organisations that we’ve written about here on the Alertsec Blog could have answered “Yes, we have a data encryption strategy.” However, having a strategy and having a strategy in use and even having a strategy effectively in use are all different. Almost every company that has had a security breach has had a strategy – the breach occurred because management was lulled into believing that having the strategy meant everything is secure.
Security programs need to be easy to administer
The percentage of organisations using a platform approach to managing encryption solutions has increased where one software is used as a platform throughout the organisation. Additionally, 76 percent would strongly recommend or recommend the platform-based approach if where it reduces the cost of acquiring, deploying and managing encryption.
That’s why we’ve but so much focus on the ease in administering the Alertsec Xpress software. Alertsec Xpress administration is designed to offer hassle-free deployment and set-up. Alertsec Xpress is pre-configured with a “best practice” setting to offer a secure, yet user friendly, implementation.
Security exceptions don’t have to break the rules
When standard settings do not correlate with the internal security policy, Alertsec offers the opportunity to create a customer specific configuration. This specific configuration could also add a local administration account which enables the customer to do additional work on the PCs, once deployed. The ability to add additional users to a PC and read and monitor the local log file are key benefits for a larger deployment.
Data Breaches continue to be a huge problem
As noted at the start of this article, the Ponemon Institute study reports that eighty-five percent of organisations surveyed had had at least 1 data breach in the last 12 months. When you compare this to the 70% of the companies who claim to have a data encryption strategy it makes our point.
Having a strategy is one thing. Picking software like Alertsec that will allow you to fully implement that strategy is where the rubber hits the road in the world of digital security.
