Budget-squeezed organizations face greater data security risks

Organizations are more at risk and least prepared for cyberthreats, a growing trend even before COVID-19.

In 2018, 53% of mid-market companies suffered a security breach, according to Cisco’s global Small and Mighty Cybersecurity Special Report.

Without question, companies – especially smaller and mid-sized companies – are facing significant challenges, with unpredictable revenue.

Cyberattacks on average cost an organization $200,000, and while large enterprises might weather that kind of storm, small companies may find themselves completely under water.

Brand reputation, critical to any enterprise, only takes a moment to lose.

Titus survey: Cloud data exposure key threat

Titus’s recent survey of 300 CISOs, CIOS and CTOs of companies with 250 to 1,000 employees bring these concerns into dramatic focus.

According to Viktor Popov, Titus product manager, most are concerned about exposure of sensitive data, especially in the cloud.

The top security concern for North America and EMEA companies are cloud data exposure and keeping sensitive data private. These executives also were more concerned about outsider threats than breaches from company insiders.

The best way for any company to protect itself from cyber threats is to be proactive about security.

And many smaller organizations recognize they need to move to the cloud.

We see businesses start on the journey to protect their data with tools but often those tools don’t work well together.

Instead, they end up with siloed security ecosystems where false negatives occur. They don’t understand the information and data flowing through these different tools.

Rollouts slow and user friction takes hold.

Adding to this challenge is a lack of resources at the top to guide these implementations. Small and mid-size organizations frequently lack a chief data or chief security officer.

You need someone who can vouch for the data and own your security program.

Knowing what kind of data you need to protect is critical, but smaller organizations often lack the resources and bandwidth of a large multinational to address the issues of siloed security systems and senior management ownership.

Smaller organizations increasingly rely on the cloud to store and manage corporate information and frequently rely on fewer IT staff.

These teams need data classification solutions that are easy and quick to deploy – a plug-and-play solution that helps companies define what data is sensitive so they can be more compliant with privacy laws.

And make no mistake: customers care that you are protecting their data.

According to Cisco’s Cybersecurity Report Series 2020 for Small and Medium-Sized Business, smaller businesses overwhelmingly receive inquiries from customers about how they’re handling their data, versus not receiving inquiries.

Key findings from Titus’ CISO, CIO and CTO survey

Titus recently teamed with MSI, a global research company, to survey 300 global executives, including CEOs, CISOs, CTOs, CIOs and chief data or analytics officers to uncover their top data security concerns.

The majority of those polled were from North America followed by Singapore and Australia in APAC and the UK in EMEA.

The second-largest group surveyed were SMBs with less than 1,000 employees.

Here is a quick summary of key findings:

• More than 60% of executives believe that the context of data is most accurate while in motion / point of creation before we explain the benefits of our approach.
• That number jumps to 90% once respondents understand the analytics / AI, and data privacy value.
• Almost all roles agree that the number one and two security challenges are exposure of data in the cloud and keeping sensitive data private.
• Roles largely agree that organizational efficiency and business opportunity are the number one or number three most important problems.
• Healthcare and government organizations are most concerned with malicious insider threats, whereas the other industries align on cloud exposure and protecting sensitive data.

How Titus and HelpSystems helps solve your data security needs

HelpSystems provides solutions to help improve your organization’s data security and compliance posture.

Our data security offerings allow you to understand your sensitive data and keep it secure throughout its lifecycle, no matter where it resides (on premise or in the cloud), or how it’s shared.

This includes Titus Classification Suite and other HelpSystems solutions such as Adaptive Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Secure Managed File Transfer (MFT), and Data Encryption.

They also help organizations that face a growing list of data privacy regulations that carry costly fines for non-compliance.

These regulations, including GDPR and CCPA, require corporations to keep close track of every single piece of data collected from the public.

The need to protect data – and being compliant to data privacy regulations – will not going away just because an organization is small and cash-strapped.

But to protect your data, you need to first know how to identify it.

Most industries today are regulated and PII and brand reputation are always a concern.

But smaller organizations don’t have the IT, capabilities and money to build out a huge compliance program.

We can help organizations of all sizes identify, classify and secure their data, especially in today’s challenging environment.

Read our blog post on the role of people and systems to stop data breaches and the list of resources and articles available on our data protection for remote workers page.

This post was first first published on Titus website by Team Titus. You can view it by clicking here