Despite a wealth of recent high profile data breaches, fewer than 30 percent of enterprises encrypt data across their on-premises data environments, within their cloud providers or on their mobile devices.
That’s according to French aerospace and security multinational Thales Group’s 2019 Data Threat Report, released this morning.
Its survey found that the danger of a breach occurring is high, with 60 percent of companies surveyed admitting that they had been compromised.
Enterprise executives are also acutely aware of the risks posed by a breach: 86 percent of the 1,200 surveyed for the report, conducted for Thales by International Data Corporation (IDC) acknowledged that they are vulnerable to attack.
The fear has yet to drive a major uptick in enterprise encryption use.
Frank Dickson research VP for security products research at IDC commented in an emailed statement that: “Our research shows that no organization is immune from data security threats and, in fact, we found that the most sophisticated organizations are more likely to indicate that they have experienced a data security breach.”
Low Enterprise Encryption Rates Blamed on Cloud Complexity
Company executives cited the increasing complexity of their data environments as a major barrier to securing all their sensitive data. For many years the practice was to keep data in a secure siloed location that might only be accessed for record purposes.
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However, we now live in an information-oriented economy and companies are rushing to glean valuable insights or uses from their data. This is resulting in a mixed data environment where sensitive data is located in a myriad of locations.
“Data environments are increasingly complex. Workloads that used to be handled by a single on-premises environment are now being augmented with multiple IaaS and PaaS environments, as well as tens and even hundreds of SaaS applications,” the report notes.
The complexity of cloud environments is cited as a principal barrier by 44 percent of executives. This barrier was ranked higher than budget constraints and staffing issues.
Tina Stewart VP of market strategy at Thales eSecurity wrote in the report that: “Organizations need to take a fresh look at how they implement a data security and encryption strategy in support of their transition to the cloud and meeting regulatory and compliance mandates.”
“We have now reached a point where almost every organization has been breached. As data breaches continue to be widespread and commonplace, enterprises around the globe can rely on Thales to secure their digital transformation in the face of these ongoing threats. ”
