While the conversation around cybersecurity continues to gain momentum in 2022, one topic that businesses are focusing on is how there are multiple ways in which employees’ behavior is unwittingly becoming a threat to their own organization.
Ruben Dennenwaldt, Senior Product Marketing Manager EMEA at Western Digital.
Many organizations have been making a concerted effort to bring awareness to digital privacy — including educating people on how to manage their personal and professional information to help keep it secure. Their aim would be to provide clear guidance and tips on how individuals and businesses alike can do what they can to take control of their personal data, identify the most reliable partners, and strike a seamless balance between privacy and accessibility.
According to a recent study from Western Digital, 68 percent of data managers believe employee behavior is a bigger threat to their highly sensitive data than external hackers, and one in four data security incidents is estimated to have originated with employees. Managers say that they have seen security threats and incidents increase in the last year and 22 percent of data users are also aware of the fact that they have put highly sensitive data at risk in the same time period.
But that risk is being increasingly exacerbated by a number of factors, including a changing threat landscape, a lack of appropriate data security tools, insecure internal storage and sharing practices. Combined, these challenges have created a safety pinch point for data security decision makers. Across the board, managers believe that protection of data could be improved – particularly in how their organizations store and transmit sensitive data.
Data users represent a far greater risk than ever before. In part, that’s down to hackers getting smarter and more sophisticated with the ways that they target employees. It’s also a result of an overnight switch to remote working, which rapidly increased the use of personal devices for work tasks, and separated employees physically from their IT teams. However, there’s no getting around the fact that poor password habits and a lack of education are also issues.
Remote working and risky security practices
Remote and hybrid working styles have become the new norm with many data users collaborating online on projects that require extensive data sharing capabilities. But these collaborative and remote ways of working have introduced additional challenges and exposed some major risks. The top risks cited in the survey by data managers are:
- 47 percent employees sharing physical hard disks (HDDs) and solid-state drives (SSDs) with colleagues at work to share data
- 26 percent employees sharing their work devices with family and friends, especially during the lockdown when children were at home and attending schools online
- 27 percent employees taking sensitive data with them when they left an organization, which became difficult to monitor during the time of remote working
These risks have significant implications for the security and prosperity of the organizations that people work for. They have caused data managers and IT teams to consider what tools and solutions employees have to prevent them from inadvertently putting data at risk. When polled, 35% of data managers thought employees lack the tools/ technology to safeguard data at home, and 33% believe that employees feel psychologically more ‘removed’ from risks while working remotely. Meanwhile, many continue to feel there’s simply a lack of clear guidance provided by employers. All of which adds up to a growing problem for data security and storage.
Sharing and transferring data
There continues to be a clear gap in employee behavior between the data sharing method used and their assumption of what the most secure way to share sensitive data is. The most common methods for sharing or transmitting highly sensitive data by employees are email and cloud, or online file sharing, ahead of HDD / SSD and USB drives. Ease of use and familiarity are key factors in the decision-making process for data users when it comes to how they share sensitive data.
However, according to the study, 88 percent of data managers still want more control over how data is stored and shared. Coupled with the belief that data security needs immediate improvement, more than half of data managers (54%) intend to increase their use of HDDs and SSDs over the next two years, due to the encryption and security features these technologies can offer.
Ultimately, most of the data managers say HDDs or SSDs with encryption or security features address many of the concerns companies may have had about using physical drives for sorting and sharing sensitive data.
The way forward
In today’s business environment, increased security risks, employee behavior and the sheer volume of data produced, all mean that it can be hard for organizations to stay on top of security and storage challenges. As technology advances, and the way people work continues to change, employees and employers are looking for ways to store and share sensitive data more securely. The correct infrastructure which is integrated with encryption platforms and employee education on the threats they may expose their organization to, will help to improve the threat landscape and reduce risk.
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