Most companies use encryption to protect proprietary data

Jan 22, 2016 09:45 GMT  ·  By

A survey carried out by cyber-security vendor Sophos among 1,700 IT professionals reveals that only 44% of companies deploy encryption with their products while another 43% use encryption "to some degree."

Organizations that do encrypt do it for various reasons, and based on the survey's data, most use encryption to protect proprietary company data (61%).

Other cited reasons are: to protect employee personnel data (56%), to comply with local laws (50%), to follow a general security policy (49%), because they're afraid of data-stealing attacks (38%), to avoid negative PR due to data breaches (23%), and to avoid the financial costs of a data breach (18%).

Customer data more important than personnel data

Companies that participated in the survey have also inadvertently revealed that they put a lot more effort into securing customer data than their employees' personal details.

The image below reveals that organizations have spent more time implementing encryption for applications and services that deal with customer details, and have in some cases lagged behind when securing their sensitive files and staff's details.

Furthermore, Sophos has also discovered that desktops and servers are often using encryption protocols to protect sensitive information while wearables, smartphones, and tablets are generally left unprotected, despite the last two having built-in encryption features and also being widely used by all types of employees and execs.

Organizations are learning not to trust "the cloud"

The situation is a little better for cloud services, where 39% of organizations encrypt all their files while another 47% also encrypt some of the files stored online in services like Dropbox, OneDrive, or Google Drive.

As for encryption methods, 27% of companies use full disk encryption for all their data storage systems, 37% use per-file encryption methods, while 36% use a mix of the two methods.

The State of Encryption Today report is available for download from Sophos' website in exchange for your precious work email.

While 44% and 43% are strong percentages when it comes to the number of companies using encryption for all or some part of their services, the percentage is still low, especially since the number of data breaches has been constantly going up in the last few years.

What companies protect with encryption
What companies protect with encryption

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Encryption still not a standard in the corporate world
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