Low confidence in user data security among IT professionals

According to a study by BlackBerry, there is a very low level of trust among IT departments in the Western world in terms of securing employees’ user data, reports ITProPortal. The report on the study was published after a survey of 500 IT professionals from six Western countries.

Of these 500 respondents, 94 percent do not believe that their company’s user data can be kept secure. It is also clear from the report that companies should identify and secure users, because employees will in fact continue to do what they do, whether those habits are safe or not. Furthermore, the report states that there is a ‘false dichotomy’ in the game, because productivity and safety do not have to exclude each other, but this is often seen as such. According to BlackBerry, there is no reason for organisations to sacrifice safety for productivity and vice versa.

Policy versus reality

The survey shows that nearly six out of ten IT professionals feel that their employees need to manoeuvre around internal policies to get their work done. One of the biggest concerns for IT professionals, for example, is the use of file sharing, which inherently results in files being stored externally. The files shared in it are not secured and once they leave an organization, they are virtually untraceable. As a result, the distribution of these stocks can no longer be stopped, restricted or monitored at all. Since the entry into force of the AVG (GDPR), this problem has logically increased.

At many financial institutions, gaps in security and the file sharing mentioned above have led to data leaks. In most of these cases, institutions have experienced a decline in productivity, fines for not working under the AVG and, on top of that, the fact that other companies have obtained vital data from the competitor.