Brazil ranks the highest globally for threats on sensitive data from malicious insiders
Thales, a leader in critical information systems, cybersecurity and data security, announces the results of its 2018 Brazil Encryption Trends Study. The report, based on independent research by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Thales, reflects some of the changes and challenges Brazilian organizations are experiencing due to widespread cloud deployments, the need to protect customer personal information and intellectual property, the use of multiple public cloud providers and continued data security threats.
The report reveals enterprises have accelerated adoption of encryption strategies in Brazil in order to protect sensitive data or applications, with 35% of respondents saying they have an encryption strategy applied consistently across their organizations. This is however below the global average of 43%. Alarmingly, Brazil had the highest rating for malicious insiders as a threat to sensitive data of any other country in the global survey (30%). Financial records (60%) and payment-related data (55%) are the two most commonly encrypted data types in Brazil and rose nearly 10% over last year. In fact, Brazil had the highest rate of encryption of financial records of any other country in the global survey.
Steady growth for encryption in the cloud:
The increasing use of multiple cloud providers has organizations struggling to cope with a higher number of encryption deployments, causing a greater need for skilled personnel to handle key management. In fact, 79% of respondents either use the cloud for sensitive/non-sensitive applications and data today, or will do so within the next two years. In addition, 43% said cloud providers have complete control of their keys and encryption processes.
- 45% of Brazil respondents are using more than one public cloud provider, and 56% plan to in the next two years
- 66% of respondents either perform encryption on premise prior to sending data to the cloud, or encrypt in the cloud using keys they generate and manage on premises.
A case for key protection, key management and encryption applications
Both key management solutions including hardware security modules (HSMs) as well as encryption applications have an important role to play in data protection initiatives. Performance, enforcement of policy, support for emerging algorithms and key management are top of mind as encryption use grows. For Brazil, HSM use is set to grow significantly over the next year for their several core use cases including SSL/TLS, application level encryption, payment credential provisioning and payment transaction processing.
Ruben Lazo, vice president of Thales in Latin America, says:
“Widespread cloud adoption, the increasing need to protect customer personal information and intellectual property as well as the ongoing challenge to guard against data threats are major concerns in Brazil. Organizations have to make putting sophisticated encryption strategies into place a priority or sensitive data and information will continue to remain vulnerable to new attacks. A key takeaway from this study is that enterprises are increasingly adopting encryption and investing in IT security to protect against internal and external threats.”
Roman Baudrit, AVP of Thales in Latin America, says:
“With a high rate of attacks on sensitive data from malicious insiders to a lower than average use of encryption, the results from this report should serve as a wake-up call for organizations across Brazil. What’s needed to deal with today’s threat landscape are fast, scalable data security tools, such as encryption together with strong policy management to prevent insider threats, that encompass both enterprise and cloud use cases. Fortunately, there are more data protection choices today than ever before including bring your own key (BYOK) and bring your own encryption (BYOE) solutions, which allow enterprises to apply the same encryption and key management solution across multiple platforms.”
The Global Encryption Trends Study is now in its thirteenth year. The Ponemon Institute surveyed more than 5,000 people across multiple industry sectors in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia, Japan, Brazil, the Russian Federation, Mexico, India, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Korea.
The new 2018 Brazil Encryption Trends Study can be downloaded here.