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Data security threat grows as businesses stagnate on solutions

data security

According to a new report from Thales Security, organisations are putting more money toward data security solutions, only to experience more security breaches than ever.

The report shows that 26 per cent of respondents experienced a breach in the past year, up from 21.7 per cent the previous year. This is reflected in feelings of vulnerability across the board, with 88 per cent of respondents feeling some degree of vulnerability to data threats, and 9.1 per cent feeling ‘extremely vulnerable’.

Thales Security believes the issue is that organisations keep spending on the same solutions that have worked in the past, but have become outdated in today’s modern threat landscape. This can be seen in the fact that network and endpoint security continue to top the list of planned spending categories, despite the fact that endpoint security is now ranked at the bottom of the list in terms of effectiveness at preventing data breaches and data theft.

Compliance (44 per cent) remains the primary reason for spending on data security, followed by implementing security best practices (38 per cent). Meanwhile, brand and reputation dropped to 36 per cent from 50 per cent last year.

As for solutions, encryption has been identified as the clear choice (64 per cent) to satisfy local data privacy laws. This is followed by tokenisation (40 per cent), while migrating data to jurisdictions or choosing local cloud providers are at the bottom of the list.

Complexity (50.4 per cent) remains the biggest barrier to more aggressive adoption of data security solutions, followed by lack of staff (36 per cent).

“In a departure from both practical experience and anecdotal evidence,” according to Thales, more than 75 per cent of respondents claim ‘complete knowledge’ of where sensitive data is located, up significantly from last year (36 per cent).

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