How important is encryption to an organization’s security? We recently completed the 2006 National Encryption Survey to find out what security and data privacy professionals think about using this technology to protect sensitive and confidential information. According to our findings, encryption has not been embraced by organizations as part of a solution for protecting sensitive data from a security breach. In fact, only 4.2 percent of companies responding to our survey report that their organizations have an enterprisewide encryption plan.
Key Findings
Most common uses of encryption: Encryption is mostly used to protect sensitive or confidential electronic documents when sending them to another system or location (47 percent).
Only 31 percent encrypt data on a computer storage device such as a server or laptop and 24 percent encrypt sensitive or confidential backup files or tapes before sending them to offsite storage locations.
The primary reason among respondents for not encrypting sensitive or confidential information is concern about system performance (69 percent) followed by complexity (44 percent) and cost (25 percent).