Almost seven out of 10 employees admit to sharing sensitive information outside their organization, with productivity ranking higher on employees' priority lists than protection, according to an information security survey.
Mountain View, Calif., enterprise management firm Seclore released the results of the survey, conducted at Citrix Synergy 2016, which illustrates alarming trends in enterprise security. The company polled more than 100 financial services, healthcare and manufacturing IT professionals with varying levels of experience.
While cybersecurity is a top concern for businesses now more than ever, the survey found that the majority of organizations continue to put sensitive data at risk.
Findings include 69% of respondents who admitted to sharing sensitive data outside the organization and 40% of respondents who said C-Suite executives pose the greatest risk to sensitive data.
Additionally, the survey revealed that employees are still mismanaging corporate priorities and putting sensitive data at risk. Nearly half of employees (48%) ranked productivity as their top concern, followed by convenience (28%) and security (17%). Twenty-nine percent of employees put sensitive data at risk in favor of productivity.
Finance departments are most likely to share sensitive information across and outside the organization (23%), followed by sales (20%) and engineering (15%).
"As organizations continue to push their workforces to increase productivity and raise efficiency, it's not surprising that so many employees confess to taking short-cuts," Selcore CEO Vishal Gupta said. "Until employees are armed with easy to use, data-centric solutions capable of automatically securing information at the point of sharing or download, you can expect problems such as data leakage to persist in the enterprise."
In the Seclore survey, 40% of respondents also reported retaining access to sensitive data after leaving a job.
Last month, the FDIC detected and moved to mitigate a breach of 44,000 customer records after an employee leaving the agency in February inadvertently downloaded the data containing personally identifiable information to a removable media device.
The FDIC reported to Congress that five additional major data-breach incidents occurred since Oct. 30. In every case, employees with legitimate data access left the agency and inadvertently downloaded personal data.
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Roy Urrico
Roy W. Urrico specializes in articles about financial technology and services for Credit Union Times, as well as ghostwriting, copywriting, and case studies. Also: writer/editor of a semi-annual newsletter for Association for Financial Technology since 1997 and history projects funded by the U.S Interior Department, National Park Service and Warren County (N.Y.).
