5 Major Info Security Trends in 2019

In co-operation with IDM, we recently conducted a study to look into how companies across Asia-Pacific manage, store and protect their unstructured enterprise information. Fastman approached organisations in the services, consumer, government, healthcare, financial and technology sectors to find out the current trends for managing and securing big data.

Some of the topics covered in the study included:

• The adoption rate of industry standard practices
• The preferred security measures for companies
• On-premise vs cloud storage
• The most important business information protection methods
• How companies perform damage control

We discovered some surprising takeaways, a few of which I will cover in this blog post.

Takeaway #1 – Most Organisations Have No Easy Way to Identify and Fix Errors

An overwhelming 89% of respondents had no easy way to identify and fix security loopholes and access control issues when they were identified. Instead, they relied upon manual methods or third-party experts to fix things for them. In the case of incorrectly set access rights or other security breaches, these organisations would manually revisit and repair each individual folder or piece of content.

This implies that these companies could be spending weeks or months fixing errors.

The prospect of a security breach is something that no organisation wants to deal with, but realistically has to prepare for. Without an automated tool to bulk repair or roll-back erroneous access control changes, these organisations are at risk of bringing their entire business to a grinding halt in the event of an oversight or malicious change.

Takeaway #2 – Most Companies Need to be Flexible with their Security

The increasing trend toward remote work has forced companies to be flexible with their security and data. 81% of companies who responded To our survey currently allow access to sensitive data from personal devices such as smartphones, laptops and home computers.

While this produces a security risk for companies, the flexibility afforded to employees often increases productivity. The implication of this though is that companies have a demand for tighter yet more flexible security measures than were historically provided. Access control is one such solution that may assist companies with this challenge.

Takeaway #3 – Only 1 in 4 companies follow an industry standard for info security

74% of organisations in the study do not currently follow any form of standard information security guidelines such as ISO 27000. 55% of the respondents didn’t follow any formal guidelines, and 19% indicated that they were unaware of such guidelines.

This takeaway seems to imply that most companies who deal with large quantities of data are not up to industry standards when considering information security. These companies may soon find that stricter regulations, similar to GDPR, may hinder their future business operations forcing them to change their current processes.

Takeaway #4 – Digital signatures are rising in popularity

Digital signatures have gone from hardly used, to becoming a reliable and dependable method for authenticating information. E-signature transactions have ballooned from $89 million to $754 million in just the last 5 years, indicating that confidence in information security and binding digital methods is increasing.

The study showed that 39% of our respondents used digital signatures in their organisation. While the majority do not use or are unsure of whether they use the technology, this figure has grown in recent years at an exponential rate.

Takeaway #5 – Organisations are starting to take note of internal data risks

The fear of targeted attacks and external threats has historically been a well-established fear for companies. It was an interesting takeaway to note that the next most significant data risk that companies identified was the fear of privileged staff releasing information – and this fear has been growing steadily.

23% of the companies in the study cited privileged staff leaking information as the greatest risk to their information security. This indicates that companies must not only address security from external threats, but also create checks and balances against those who they employ.

Get the facts for yourself

There’s a lot more interesting facts and guidance in the full research paper. This gives valuable insights into the latest industry trends in information security.

Some additional topics covered in the full report include:

• How permissions management helps companies today
• Industry adoption and adaptation to the latest info security methods
• On-premise and cloud security solutions
• The most important business information protection method
• The best detection methods businesses use today
• How to conduct internal security audits
• ISO 27000 compliance

We cover so much more than just the above and we’d like to share our findings with you. Simply download our free research paper here, and discover the info security facts for yourself today.