Globally, reports of successful data breaches are up compared to 2017 – and this trend is reflected in Europe.
- 32% of European respondents reported being breached in the past year – again (the global average is 36%; the US figure is 46%)
- Germany and the UK saw large increases in the number of companies reporting breaches
- Despite the growth of breaches of UK companies, only 31% of them say they feel very or extremely vulnerable to data threats
- Swedish companies felt the most vulnerable (49%) followed by the Netherlands (47%) and Germany 36%)
Recommendations
Discover and classify your data – organisations must get a better handle on the location of sensitive data it keeps.
Review IT security tools - look for data security tool sets that go beyond traditional network and endpoint approaches.
Going ‘beyond compliance’ – go beyond compliance recommendations and
Encryption and access control – the report urges organisations to take encryption beyond laptops and desktops with the following recommendations.
- Cloud – encrypt and manage keys locally
- Big data - employ discovery as a complement to encryption and access control within the environment
- Containers - encrypt and control access to data both within containers and underlying data storage locations
- IoT - use secure device ID and authentication
- Blockchain - while it may be early for commercial implementations, blockchain promises to play a big role in terms of securing transactions, authenticating users and securing data from tampering
- Data sovereignty - consider both encryption and tokenisation as a way to avoid ensure compliance with privacy laws e.g. GDPR
The Thales 2018 European Data Threat Report is based on data from 400 senior security managers across Germany, UK, the Netherlands and Sweden.
Download your copy of the 2018 Thales Data Threat Report – European edition.