ME Encryption Study sponsored by Thales scrutinizes cyber attacks

According to the latest 2016 Global Encryption Trends Study: Middle East, based on independent research by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Thales, 45% of respondents either don’t have an encryption plan or strategy, or have a limited encryption strategy for certain types of sensitive data, such as Social Security numbers or credit card accounts.
A large proportion of respondents (75%) embrace some type of encryption strategy, meaning the use of encryption continues to grow in response to privacy compliance regulations, consumer concerns and cyber-attacks. The majority of organisations plan to transfer sensitive data to the cloud within the next two years, or already do so, indicating an awareness to address the issue.

Philip Schreiber, Regional Sales Director for Thales e-Security MEASA said, “The proliferation of data that is occurring with increased connectivity, larger numbers of endpoint devices and greater use of the cloud, means we would expect most organisations to have an encryption strategy applied consistently across the entire enterprise, yet results show that just over half do.”

Dr Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of The Ponemon Institute said, “The findings of this year’s study demonstrate the importance of both encryption and key management across a wide range of core enterprise applications – from networking, databases and application level encryption to PKI, payments, public and private cloud computing and more.”