A majority of senior managers don't know where sensitive company data is stored, and they don't have access policies set in place.
Businesses are putting themselves at serious
risk of data loss or data breaches because senior management doesnt know where
company data is stored, a survey from data governance software specialist
Varonis Systems indicated. In the survey of more than 400 companies, 67 percent
of respondents said that senior management in their organizations either don't
know where all company data resides or are not sure. In addition, 74 percent of
organizations reported that they do not have a process for tracking which files
have been placed on third-party cloud digital collaboration and storage
services.
While 23 percent of respondents said they are
developing a process for authorizing and reviewing access to cloud storage
platforms, only 9 percent of respondents' companies actually have policies for
that in place. This suggests that for the 68 percent of respondents with no
plans in place or formal processes for granting and reviewing access, the
majority of businesses data is up for grabs, as the report terms it.
The bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend is
also causing consternation among organizations, with a majority of respondents
(57 percent) reporting that BYOD would be a more attractive option for their
organizations if they could provide secure access to their internal file shares
for collaboration. Overall, 78 percent of survey respondents said they would
prefer to use their existing permissions and storage if they could provide
collaboration and file-synchronization services similar to cloud-based
services.
"The results clearly show a lack of
control by those organizations that have adopted cloud file-sync
services," David Gibson, vice president of strategy at Varonis, said in a
press statement. "The most disturbing findings were the number of
companies that report they have no way to track what data is being stored in
the cloud, no process to manage access to that data (or plans to do so), and
that management doesn't know where enterprise data is stored. This should act
as a wake-up call for organizations to develop a conscious strategy to ensure
secure collaboration as quickly as possible."
In response to the survey results, Gibson
drew up a list of recommendations for secure collaboration, suggesting
companies monitor access to all data, which could help identity data owners and
identify unused data and abuse, and also identify data owners for each data
set. Gibson said owners should then perform a preliminary entitlement review to
see if data is safely and correctly stored and determine that no unauthorized
users have access to that data.
Nathan Eddy is Associate Editor, Midmarket, at eWEEK.com. Before joining eWEEK.com, Nate was a writer with ChannelWeb and he served as an editor at FierceMarkets. He is a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.
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