Although the use of encryption in the cloud increased significantly over last year, Mexico ranks the lowest in the global survey for overall encryption use
Thales, a leader in critical information systems, cybersecurity and data security, announces the results of its 2018 Mexico Encryption Trends Study. The report, based on independent research by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Thales, reflects some of the changes and challenges Mexican organizations are experiencing due to widespread cloud deployments, the need to protect sensitive information from internal and external sources, accidental disclosure, and continued data security threats from hackers.
The report reveals enterprises are adopting encryption in Mexico in order to protect sensitive data or applications, with 30% of respondents saying they have an encryption strategy applied consistently across their organizations. This is, however, below the global average of 43%. Alarmingly, Mexico had the highest rating for hackers as a threat to sensitive data of any other country in the global survey.
Financial records (52%) and payment-related data (51%) are the two most commonly encrypted data types in Mexico. This is a significant change from last year, where employee/HR data was the dominant data type to be encrypted. And for the second straight year Mexico, more than any other country in the survey, ranked key management as a top-valued feature of encryption.
Steady growth for encryption in the cloud projected
The increasing use of multiple cloud providers has organizations struggling to cope with a higher number of encryption deployments, causing a greater need for trained and experienced staff to handle key management. Despite the high value Mexican organizations place on key management, they also reported the highest level of pain (77%) associated with a lack of skilled personnel.
- 46% of Mexico respondents are using more than one public cloud provider and 71% plan to in the next two years;
- 78% of Mexico respondents either use the cloud for sensitive/non-sensitive applications and data today, or will do so within the next two years; and,
- 45% of organizations indicate that they will only use keys for data-at-rest encryption that they, instead of a cloud provider, control.
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 Mexico, HSM use is expected to grow over the next year for several core use cases including database encryption, public cloud encryption, payment transaction processing and payment credential provisioning.
Ruben Lazo, vice president of Thales in Latin America, says:
Widespread cloud adoption, the increasing need for skilled personnel as well as the ongoing challenge to guard against hackers are major concerns in Mexico. 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 Mexican enterprises need to be more vigilant about adopting encryption or there will be real consequences.”
Roman Baudrit, AVP of Thales in Latin America, says:
“With the lowest use of encryption than any other country in the global study, this report should send a strong and clear message to organizations across Mexico. Today’s threat landscape requires fast, scalable data security tools, such as encryption paired with strong policy management for insider threat prevention, for 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, that 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.