In addition, only one in five respondents are very confident in their ability to protect against sophisticated malware attacks with respondents more worried about spear phishing attacks (73 percent are concerned) than any other breach method.
“The fact that IT and business decision makers are not confident in their anti-malware defence implies that they may be using outdated or ineffective tools,” adds Brett Hansen, Executive Director of Data Security Solutions, Dell.
“When IT teams do not have the resources they need to proactively prevent threats and stay on top of the evolving threat landscape, they are forced to play defence using threat detection and remediation alone.”
Mobility
As Hansen explains, employers feel they have to limit mobility in order to protect data.
“The common narrative is that all offices are becoming more mobile, but according to this report, the truth is somewhat more complicated,” he adds.
Hansen says the majority of mid-market companies (65 percent) are holding back plans to make their workforce more mobile for security reasons with 67 percent hesitant to introduce a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) program.
While 82 percent of decision makers have attempted to limit data access points to enhance security, 72 percent of decision makers believe that knowing where data is accessed will make their data protection measures more effective.
Going further, Hansen says 69 percent of respondents say they are still willing to sacrifice individual devices to protect their company against a data breach, yet 57 percent of respondents are still concerned about the quality of encryption used by their company.
Security concerns aside, two in five respondents are interested in allowing greater mobility for enhanced employee productivity.
“When organisations opt out of creating sanctioned, secure mobility programs, they open themselves up to other risks,” Hansen adds.
“Mobility and security can easily co-exist with modern data security technology that uses intelligent encryption to protect data whether it’s at rest, in motion or in use.”
Public Cloud
With more employees using public cloud services like Box and Google Drive in the workplace, Hansen claims decision makers are not confident in their ability to control risks posed by these applications.
Nearly four in five respondents are concerned with uploading critical data to the cloud, and 58 percent are actually more concerned than they were a year ago.
According to findings, 38 percent of decision makers have restricted access to public cloud sites within their organisation due to security concerns.
At present, 57 percent of decision makers who are current cloud users, and 45 percent of those planning to use public cloud platforms, will rely heavily on cloud vendors to provide security.
Hansen says only one in three organisations cite improving secure access to public cloud environments as a key focus for their security infrastructure, yet 83 percent say that employees are either using, or will soon be using, public cloud environments to share and store valuable data.
“Security programs must enable employees to be both secure and productive, and this means enabling technology that helps them do their jobs,” Hansen adds.
“Companies can try to limit or prohibit public cloud use, but it’s more effective to use intelligent data encryption to protect corporate data wherever it may go, and reduce the risk of employees working around restrictive policies in order to be productive.”
