Thales has announced the publication of its 2016 Global Encryption Trends Study. The report, based on independent research by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Thales and Vormetric Data Security, reveals that the use of encryption continues to grow in response to cyber-attacks, privacy compliance regulations and consumer concerns and highlights that the majority of organizations plan to transfer sensitive data to the cloud within the next two years.
The global encryption study is in its 11th year and shows how organizations around the world are dealing with increased vulnerabilities and implementation of encryption to protect their most sensitive data. The Ponemon Institute surveyed more than 5000 business and IT managers in the US, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Mexico, India, and for the first time this year Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, examining global encryption trends and regional differences in encryption usage.
Key findings include:
- More than half of respondents (56 percent) are transferring sensitive or confidential data to the cloud: and this will rise to a total of 84 percent in the next two years.
- Support for both cloud and on-premise deployment was rated the most important consideration when deploying encryption solutions.
- Employee and HR data is the most commonly encrypted data – higher even than payment data, intellectual property or financial records – indicating a higher sensitivity to protecting personal information.
- The number one perceived threat to data exposure is employee mistakes, followed by system or application malfunction rather than external attack or malicious insiders.
