Data Privacy Is A Growing Concern Among IT Pros
By Christine Kern, contributing writer
A study released by Dimensional Research has found data privacy is now a chief concern from the majority of IT professionals. “The State of Data Privacy in 2015” examines the increased significance of data privacy, IT challenges of managing privacy of sensitive data, and the impact of cloud technologies.
The research reveals 93 percent of businesses are challenged by data privacy. Sponsored by Druva, the survey of IT professionals responsible for corporate data in their organizations highlights attitudes, trends, and challenges regarding the task of ensuring the privacy of sensitive business and customer data.
And it’s not just big companies that have to worry about data privacy, as a blog post from Druva points out. The challenge of protecting sensitive data is facing organizations of all shapes and sizes. In fact, according to the blog post, smaller companies are just as concerned about maintaining the integrity of their data as large ones are, but they are ill-equipped to meet the challenge. While large enterprises may establish more measures to safeguard data privacy, they are also falling short of their goals.
Facing greater risks, larger organizations logically invest more energy into protecting the privacy of sensitive data. To protect data, 77 percent of businesses with more than 5,000 employees are investing more into data privacy in 2015, as did 100 percent of companies with 1,000-5,000 employees. Among companies with less than 100 employees, 83 percent are investing more in data privacy protection this year; so are 72 percent of those with 100-1,000 employees.
What’s different is not the perceived urgency of data privacy and other privacy/security matters. It’s what companies are prepared (and funded) to do about it.
In the survey, 84 percent of IT professionals reported that their focus on data privacy was escalating in 2015. And it is clear that giving employees data privacy policies is not sufficient; 82 percent of respondents said that they have employees who do not follow existing data privacy policies, while only 18 percent said that all their employees follow the existing policies.
Among the greatest data privacy challenges reported, 56 percent cited having insufficient employee awareness and understanding of existing data privacy policies; 45 percent said they lack a sufficient budget to purchase and implement technology solutions; 36 percent have no processes in place to train employee behavior; 34 percent cited a lack of executive visibility or priority into the problem; 27 percent said their IT team lacks knowledge of laws and requirements; and 24 percent said they lack data privacy policies.
In addition, 87 percent of those surveyed reported that they organization is concerned about data privacy in the cloud.