Businesses Are Addicted to, and Clueless About, Consumer Data: Survey

“Sixty-eight percent of the IT professionals surveyed said they believed that unauthorized users could access their corporate networks, and almost a third – 27 percent – said their perimeter security had suffered a breach in the past year.”

Businesses are addicted to consumer data, collecting so much of it that they don’t know what to do with it.

That’s one of the key takeaways from Gemalto’s latest Data Security Confidence Index, a report based on surveys of 1,050 IT administrators and 10,500 consumers around the world. The study found that 65 percent of companies surveyed couldn’t analyze all the data they collected. And that data represents a liability, with 68 percent of the companies surveyed acknowledging that they don’t fully comply with data protection laws like the European Union’s GDPR, and 54 percent saying that they don’t know where all of the sensitive information they have collected is stored.

It gets worse. Sixty-eight percent of the IT professionals surveyed said they believed that unauthorized users could access their corporate networks, and almost a third – 27 percent – said their perimeter security had suffered a breach in the past year. And those that saw a breach said that only 10 percent of the data compromised was encrypted.

Consumers, meanwhile, want companies to comply with regulations like GDPR, with 90 percent of them saying it’s important. So with the regulatory framework evolving along with digital threats, it looks like it’s time for a lot of companies around the world to step back and really consider what data they are collecting, why they’re collecting it, and whether it’s worth the risk. At the very least, they’ll want to implement some strong security wherever possible – and that doesn’t just mean encryption.