June 07, 2011
Thousands of organisations in the UK are failing to take the necessary steps in order to prevent sensitive documents falling into the wrong hands. Data protection mishaps have been headline news in recent weeks, following the unprecedented loss of millions of consumer’s details by Sony in recent weeks. And now a survey conducted by Imperva, has found that 86% of IT professionals do not know how many sensitive files their organisation holds, while just 41% had any idea where sensitive files were stored on their networks. This is the second survey conducted by Imperva following a poll of US workers earlier this year, and there is a worrying global trend developing amongst IT workers regarding data security levels. “The fact that almost a third of the organisations we spoke to had suffered a data breach indicates the importance of protecting files containing sensitive information,” said Imperva’s Amichai Shulman. “With 80% of all sensitive company data stored in files, the problem of unidentified and unprotected files will also grow unless people start to take it seriously.” Of respondents in the US, 82% stated that Wikileaks had forced them to rethink their company’s data security strategy, while in the UK only 32% said the same.