SAN FRANCISCO – Symantec’s new 2011 Enterprise Encryption Trends survey concludes that the inability to access important business information due to fragmented encryption solutions and poor key management is costing the average business $124,965 per year.

Survey has found businesses are securing data with encryption in more places than ever. The problem is that encryption solutions are fragmented, creating risk for organizations from the lack of centralized control of access to sensitive information and disrupting critical processes such as e-discovery and compliance monitoring.

“While many organizations understand the importance of encrypting their data, issues with key management and multiple point products can give them inconsistent visibility into what has been protected,” said Joe Gow, director, product management, at Symantec. “As the Enterprise Encryption Trends survey demonstrates, encryption needs to evolve from a fragmented protection historically implemented at the line of business level to a capability that is managed as a core component of organizations’ IT security operations.”

The survey found that encryption use is growing rapidly but fragmented. 48 percent of enterprises increased their use of encryption over the past two years. The respondents state that almost half of their data is now encrypted at some point in its lifecycle. The typical organization reports they have five different encryption solutions deployed.

According to the survey, one-third of respondents said unapproved encryption deployment is happening on a somewhat to extremely frequent basis. Because these projects are not necessarily following the company’s best practices, 52 percent of organizations have experienced serious issues with encryption keys including lost keys (34 percent) and key failure (32 percent). In addition, 26 percent have had former employees who have refused to return keys.

Organizations also express concerns about key management. They are not very confident in their ability to effectively manage encryption keys. 40 percent are less than somewhat confident they can retrieve keys. 39 percent are less than somewhat confident they can protect access to business information from disgruntled employees.

All of the organizations reporting encryption key issues incurred some sort of related costs. The most common costs include inability to meet compliance requests (48 percent), inability to respond to eDiscovery requests (42 percent), and inability to access important business information (41 percent). In addition, the average loss from encryption-related issues is $124,965 per year.

Symantec’s Enterprise Encryption Trends Survey is the result of research conducted in September 2011 by Applied Research, which surveyed C-level, tactical management, and strategic management. The report was designed to examine encryption use within enterprise organizations. The survey included 1,575 organizations from 37 countries in North America, EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa), Asia Pacific, and Latin America.

This column was written by Mark Cox of ConnectIT, an IntegratedMar.Com

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