Published on the 06/08/2013 | Written by Newsdesk
Australian IT managers feel less secure than their overseas peers about the risk of data being lost or stolen – but they often flinch at the costs associated with fixing the problem…
Only 38 percent of Australian CIOs or senior IT managers report feeling confident about their ability to protect corporate data from loss or theft. This compares poorly with the 73 percent of “confident” CIOs overseas.
According to fresh research from Stollznow Research, commissioned by secure storage specialist Imation, Australian confidence plunges even further for telecommuting or mobile workers where only about one in four CIOs reports feeling any level of confidence about the security of company data.
Yet by the end of 2012 fewer than two thirds of organisations had a well policed mobile device policy in place meaning that the prospect of data leakage remains high according to Sven Radavics, general manager for Imation’s IronKey business in Asia Pacific.
According to Neil Stollznow, quantitative director of Stollznow Research, the statistics are “really damning figures” that reveal an “extraordinary admission of defeat from IT decision makers in Australia.”
One of the key vectors for corporate data leakage is the use of personal storage devices such as USB thumb-drives. The research found that 91 percent of CIOs allow their staff to use USB sticks – and 44 percent allow staff to use their own USB sticks to store company data. Radavics said that this was a higher percentage than seen overseas, and while he was loath to prescribe security best practice, he said that in some markets and sectors – Japan’s finance sector for example – it was still routine to glue up USB slots.
Widespread adoption of that tactic would however wreck Imation’s business model which is to sell secure and encrypted thumbdrives. But they come at a cost. Radavics said a 64 GB IronKey stick , which he said had been designed to be “the world’s most secure thumbdrive” cost $700.
When Radavics told IT managers about the cost of the device, “I usually need to pick them up from the floor,” he said. However the company has sold its devices locally, particularly into the finance and federal government sectors.
IronKey remains a hard-sell though. Radavics said that he had been attempting to sell about a dozen devices to a local video game maker “but they found the $700 hard to stomach,” even though the company could lose key intellectual property potentially worth millions of dollars if video game content was leaked to the market ahead of launch.
