Companies operating in industries like healthcare, financial services and retail inevitably come in for a hard time if they don’t take good care of their data.
Yet a new survey by Dimensional Research for Dell Software shows the rather startling result that almost all of the IT professionals surveys in these industries lack confidence in their organizations' ability to manage governance, risk and compliance.
Among the key findings of the study are that some 93 percent of respondents are concerned about their ability to prevent unauthorized changes being made and 83 percent believe their organization's security would be improved if the security and compliance teams worked more closely together and shared more information.
One of the main concerns is unauthorized access to data with 94 percent having worries divided between both internal and external access. 61 percent are concerned about both, 22 percent about internal access by employees and consultants and 11 percent about external access.
On compliance only 11 percent say they're "very confident" that they're capturing all of the data necessary and a third said they had no consistent process for adding new regulatory data as required. Less than 50 percent of the organizations surveyed proactively review, add or remove data sources that is no longer required -- putting these organizations at a much higher risk of security threats even though they may believe they are compliant and secure.
When it comes to improving the situation only 57 percent say that their security and compliance teams work together and only 14 percent say they share data all the time. No surprise then that 83 percent believe security and compliance would be improved by closer collaboration.
The survey talked to more than 200 individuals with responsibility for compliance in organizations with over 2,000 employees. You can read more in a white paper available on the Dell site.
Image Credit: donskarpo / Shutterstock