Posts Tagged ‘data security policy’

CertifiedMail and Osterman Research have released the findings of a study on encryption adoption.

The Encryption Solution Implementation Landscape report indicates that data is being put at risk mostly by a lack of understanding about encryption technologies. The three main areas that people cite as holding back encryption are: encryption legacy perceptions, a lack of awareness of the availability or ease of use of solutions, and a lack of understanding of the type of data that must be encrypted.

As Kelly Mackin, COO and President of CertifiedMail, notes, businesses no longer question the need for anti-virus or anti-spyware software, but it’s now the time to extend this line of thinking to other ways to protect confidential data. Encryption and laptop security software, among other security tools, should become standard practice.

Here are some of the highlights of the survey, which involved 205 organizations and more than 13,000 respondents:

• 47% of organizations did not have the ability to send encrypted emails from their desktops
• 45% can send encrypted email manually through their email client (22% of them found it difficult)
• 13% can send encrypted emails automatically through some sort of policy-based encryption capability
• 27% of organizations had experienced an accidental or malicious data leak during the previous 12 months

The survey found that users believed that encrypting email was a difficult process, although part of this has been attributed to perception rather than experience. Many users have experiences with legacy systems that have biased them against the easier tools today. The survey found an eagerness among respondents to have “click of a button” encryption available in email clients, with nearly one-half of users wanting automatic encryption capabilities.

Via security watch ; Image: iStockphoto.com