Sophos Encryption Survey Reveals Employee Banking Data and Other Personal Information is at Risk

Mar 10, 2016 :

Sophos, a global leader in network and endpoint security, today announced the findings of its recent survey, The State of Encryption Today. The survey polled 1,700 IT decision makers from mid-sized businesses in the United States, Canada, India, Australia, Japan and Malaysia, about their encryption habits, concerns and plans.

Key findings of the survey reveal that private, highly-sensitive employee information, including banking details, human resource (HR) files and personal healthcare records, are at risk. While many companies take the security of their customer data seriously, employees are not protected to the same level.

In reality, company data remains at risk as well, as nearly one-third (30 percent) of all organisations surveyed, fail to always encrypt their own corporate financial information, and nearly half (41 percent) inconsistently encrypt files containing valuable intellectual property.

According to the survey, the key barriers in encryption are lack of budget, performance concerns and lack of encryption deployment knowledge. In addition to these top three encryption barriers, some organisations also cited a lack of legal regulation pressure and some believed that encryption is not an effective tool for securing sensitive data.



Encryption adoption is relatively mature in the US, with 54 percent of organisations making extensive use of it. However only 26 percent of corporations in Malaysia do the same.

The State of Encryption Today survey includes 1,700 IT decision makers interviewed in the U.S., Canada, India, Australia, Japan and Malaysia. All respondents were from organizations with 100 to 2,000 employees in all sectors, excluding government. Vanson Bourne, an independent specialist in market research, conducted the study.

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