Use of encryption growing but businesses struggle with it – study

'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