90% of Respondents Have Data Privacy Concerns in Cloud Despite Plans to Increase Adoption

Druva, Inc. announced the results of a global survey examining data privacy in the enterprise.

The study examines companies’ efforts to protect sensitive data, challenges companies face ensuring data privacy and garnered respondent views on protecting data privacy in the cloud.

The survey, conducted by Dimensional Research and sponsored by Druva,
included these key findings:

Sensitive Data is Ubiquitous: 99% of respondents reported having sensitive data, including personal financial, healthcare and authentication-related data, they must manage.
Need for Privacy Protection: 84% of respondents reported plans to boost efforts to protect the privacy of sensitive data.
Data Privacy Policy Enforcement Required: Almost 84% of respondents reported that employees do not follow data privacy policies.
Cloud-Stored Data Increasing: Nearly 90% of respondents indicated that their volume of data stored in the cloud will increase through 2015.
Cloud Cause for Concern: 87% of companies reported being “concerned” or “very concerned” about data privacy in the cloud.

The survey results highlight the challenges today’s enterprises face as they work to prevent data loss, misuse and exposure while also adapting to changing IT infrastructure. Adding to the complexity, these same enterprises must meet compliance requirements for ever-changing regional data regulations.

“Organizations are facing a real data protection crisis. Data privacy is top-of-mind for companies worldwide, and for good reason,” said Jaspreet Singh, CEO, Druva. “Today’s enterprise is a borderless one. The globalization of data creates a challenge that exposes each region to their specific and local privacy regulations. Protecting and managing corporate data – especially in the cloud – calls for a multi-faceted approach for which Druva is setting the standard.”

Additional survey findings revealed:

19% of respondents reported their businesses do not have data privacy requirements to meet compliance and governance regulations.
93% indicated they face challenges ensuring data privacy.
82% (have employees who do not follow data privacy policies and among those, employees in sales and marketing are “most likely to ignore data privacy policies.“
56% cited “insufficient employee awareness and understanding of data privacy policies” as a major challenge to ensure privacy of sensitive data.
67% reported that meeting regional requirements for data privacy is challenging.

Challenges ensuring privacy of sensitive data

“Data privacy is fundamentally important to businesses and becoming even more important,” said Diane Hagglund, senior researcher, Dimensional Research. “This research shows that data privacy is being treated as an afterthought to security, an alarming lack of focus for an area that is so important.”

Druva has implemented a set of privacy controls to enable customers the ability to keep pace with evolving requirements. Solution includes policy settings that restrict employee data and audit trails from being accessible to administrators, delegated and granular administrative settings that allow for management segregation by region, and exclusionary policies that ensure personal data can be properly segregated.

The State of Data Privacy in 2015 survey was conducted online in March 2015 and includes IT and business professionals responsible for corporate data. A total of 214 individuals from around the globe participated in the survey, representing a range of company sizes (from fewer than 100 to more than 5,000) and industries (tech, manufacturing, education and more).

To read the complete survey (registration required)