54% of businesses consider employee mistakes the biggest threat to sensitive data, according to according to a new study from nCipher Security and the Ponemon Institute.
The 2020 Global Encryption Trends Study reveals that employee mistakes continue to be the biggest threat to sensitive data (54%) and significantly outweigh concerns over attacks by hackers (29%), or malicious insiders (20%).
In contrast, the least significant threats cited include government eavesdropping (11%) and lawful data requests (12%).
With the proliferation of data from digital initiatives, cloud use, mobility, IoT devices and the advent of 5G networks, data discovery continues to be the biggest challenge in planning and executing a data encryption strategy, with 67% of respondents citing this as their top concern. And that is likely to increase, with a pandemic-driven surge in employees working remotely, using data at home, creating extra copies on personal devices and cloud storage.
For the first time, protecting consumer personal information is the top driver for deploying encryption (54% of respondents), outranking compliance, which ranked fourth (47%).
Eighty-three percent of respondents report transferring sensitive data to the cloud, or planning to do so within the next 12 to 24 months, with organizations in the United States, Brazil, Germany, India and South Korea doing so most frequently.