Safe use of new technology bottleneck for Dutch companies’.

Dutch companies are struggling to use new technology securely and to secure sensitive data. This is evident from the Data Threat Report 2019 – European edition of security company Thales. Many companies have also had a data breach.

84 percent of organizations in Europe use or plan to use technologies such as cloud, big data, mobile payments, social media, blockchain and IoT. In such environments, however, sensitive data is very vulnerable. 24 percent of Dutch companies say they have little or no confidence in the safe use of such new technology, while 97 percent say they use sensitive data in combination with the aforementioned technologies.

It also appears that 29% of the European companies surveyed by Thales had a data breach last year. This is despite the fact that just over half of European companies (55%) believe that the use of the technologies, also known as digital transformation technologies by Thales, is highly or extremely secure. In the Netherlands, confidence in security levels is the lowest at 45 percent.

However, data leaks seem to be very common. 61% of the organisations in Europe and 60% of the companies in the Netherlands have ever noticed a data leak. Last year, 31 percent of Dutch companies had a data breach, while 14 percent had a data breach last year and at an earlier point in time.

Multi-cloud

The report shows that securing multi-clouds remains a challenge. 90 percent of European organisations use or will use cloud environments – for example, Software as a Service, Platform as a Service and Infrastructure as a Service. However, according to 38 percent, if the cloud provider fails or is taken over, data security is the biggest security issue.

According to 37 percent, lack of insight is the biggest security problem for organizations that use the cloud. 36 percent identify vulnerabilities of shared infrastructure and security hacks or attacks at the cloud provider.

It is therefore important to take away these concerns. More than a third of the Dutch organisations (37 percent) mainly use Hardware Security Modules for this purpose. Where data breaches are concerned, SLAs are used in particular (35 percent).

GDPR

The GDPR has now been in force for more than a year and 91 percent of the organisations in Europe now have to deal with more than one hundred new rules for data privacy. In the Netherlands, only 33 percent of companies see this as a top priority for IT. 24 percent of Dutch companies also failed a compliance audit last year due to data security issues.

Companies mainly use tokenisation (39 percent) and encryption of personal data (34 percent) to comply with regulations.