Category Archives: Encryption

Data breaches drive growth in use of encryption, global study finds

Posted on by

John E Dunn | Feb. 13, 2014

But complex key management holds back some.

Data breaches have for the first time become the main reason enterprises implement encryption technology, according to a study of global encryption trends by The Ponemon Institute on behalf of security firm Thales e-Security.

The firm found that 46 percent of the 4,800 enterprises and IT managers questioned from around the world said that the main reason they invested in encryption was that it could lessen the impact of breaches. This beat a desire to protect brand reputation on 44 percent and the 40 percent mentioning compliance as the motivation.

It's perhaps obvious that encryption makes stolen data less useful to criminals but the growing importance placed on protecting data rather than devices shows how the technology has risen from being precautionary measure to that of a frontline defence.

Storing data without encryption, especially customer data, is increasingly unthinkable with the US the most emphatic on this for 59 percent of those questioned. Curiously, some countries fall short of this enthusiasm with France in last place on 35 percent.

The reason is mainly local legislation and compliance regimes, with 61 percent of the US sample reporting that unencrypted customer data would require breach notification as against 33 percent believing notification would be necessary if it was.

On the face of it this is a bit surprising; many US organisations appear to believe that breach notification would not be required simply because the data had been encrypted. It is not clear that this is true although the same divide appears in all countries looked at.

The study also uncovered the usual problems with deploying encryption as well as identifying precisely where the sensitive data resides for it to be applied.

The figures also show that encryption use has doubled since the report was first compiled in 2005, and was now present in 30 percent of organisations. Not surprisingly, financial services leads the way with 43 percent making use of it.

More here:
Data breaches drive growth in use of encryption, global study finds

Use of encryption growing but businesses struggle with it – study

Posted on by

'Questions are and should be asked about the broader topics of policy issues and choice of encryption algorithms'

The 2013 Global Encryption Trends Study released today has exposed the major challenges businesses still face in executing data encryption policy.

The report, based on independent research by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Thales, revealed that use of encryption continues to grow in response to consumer concerns, privacy compliance regulations and on-going cyber attacks.

More than 4,800 business and IT managers were surveyed in the US, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, Brazil and Russia, examining global encryption trends and regional differences in encryption usage.

The results showed there has been a steady increase in the deployment of encryption solutions used by organisations over the past nine years, with 35% of organisations now having an encryption strategy applied consistently across the entire enterprise compared with 29% last year.Only 14% of organisations surveyed did not have any encryption strategy, compared with 22% last year.

For the first time, the primary driver for deploying encryption in most organisations was to lessen the impact of data breaches, whereas in previous years the primary concern was protecting the organisations brand or reputation.

Of those organisations that believed they had an obligation to disclose data breaches, nearly half believed that encrypting their data provides a safe harbour that avoids the need to disclose that the actual breach occurred.

The fastest growing reason as to why organisations were deploying encryption was to ensure they meet their commitments to their customers privacy, with 42% of organisations focussing on their customers interests rather than for their own benefit, which has increased by 5% compared with last year.

The number one perceived threat to the exposure of sensitive or confidential data remained employee mistakes, according to 27% of respondents. When employee mistakes are combined with accidental system or process malfunctions, concerns over inadvertent exposure outweigh concerns over actual malicious attacks by more than two-to-one, the report found.

Read more here:
Use of encryption growing but businesses struggle with it – study

Main menu

Posted on by

Sophos announced a new version of its Safeguard Encryption suite that it says addresses todays mobile-driven, multi-platform IT environment by taking a data-first approach to encryption.

Sophos SafeGuard Encryption version 6.1 is being launched this morning with a live video from the UK-based security software vendor. With the update, Sophos is adding modules to run on Mac, Windows 8, and iOS and Android mobile devices. With CEO Kris Hagerman appearing in the live webcast to announce the availability of its new software available through Sophos channel partners the importance of this launch is clear, says Marty Ward, the vice-president of product marketing for Sophos.

We think its a big deal, we think its a huge opportunity for us, he says. Its at the tipping point now where encryption is really prime-time.

Operating in an IT business environment means sometimes dealing with sensitive data that outsider want to get their hands on. Encryption is a crucial tool used to keep data secure and in the hands of only the people with permission to access it. Encryption software uses advanced cryptographic algorithms to scramble data, and allows those with the right key to unscramble it and read the file. But problems often arise in trying to do this with all of your data it might take too long to encrypt a large file, or a file you encrypted on a Windows PC might not be readable on a Mac.

Sophos says it wants to make encryption both useable and high performance with its SafeGuard products. The performance comes from using the native encryption methods provided by both Microsoft Corp. (Windows BitLocker) and Apple Inc. (FileVault 2) to make sure encryption is done as fast as possible.

All encryption engines are pretty much the same, Ward explains. Thats not the problem any more, the problem is performance and usability.

The usability part for Sophos comes from the ability to manage encrypted data across all devices from one management console. An IT administrator sets policies on how and when data is encrypted, and the users given permission by the organization can simply access and share files as they normally would. SafeGuard serves as the bridge between a Windows and a Mac, or a mobile device, or the cloud.

If you use one platform to manage the encryption, you have control over the keys from beginning to end, Ward says. From the user perspective, you dont have to worry about it at all, you just share data however you want.

Past versions of SafeGuard have allowed full disk encryption and file-level encryption on Windows PCs, but this is the first version that ties it all together with data-centric encryption across multiple platforms. Thats important for todays businesses that often work in a bring your own device (BYOD) environment, or some other scenario where multiple platforms are being used by workers to collaborate and access files. Sophos hopes it has solved the problem of IT administrators exchanging unencrypted data in some circumstances.

Eighty per cent of laptops out there today arent encrypted because of the performance and usability hit, those issues have been addressed, Ward says. When you throw in mobile devices and tablets now, those are different operating systems, so its impossible to find a company that is single platform right now.

The rest is here:
Main menu