Insider Threat Fears Exacerbated by Identity Management Challenges
A new survey of IT decision makers found that nearly half believe their employees would sell company data for the right price.
The 2013 Market Pulse Survey was conducted by research firm Loudhouse and fielded answers from 400 IT executives in the United States and U.K. Among those decision makers, 45 percent believe that employees within their organization would be prepared to sell company data.
The core of the problem however is not just suspicious employers and employees. According to the study, it is an overall failure to fully manage identity and access. Fifty-two percent admit their employees have read or seen company documents they should not have had access to, and more than 50 percent of the respondents have experienced situations where terminated employees tried to access company data or applications after they left the organization.
“Many organizations are struggling to manage ‘who has access to what?’ across the enterprise,” said Jackie Gilbert, CMO and founder of SailPoint, which commissioned the study, in a statement. “And as our survey indicates, the growing adoption of cloud and mobile technologies is making the problem significantly worse. It’s pretty clear that if you’re not proactively managing cloud and mobile access today, you’re at increased risk of fraud, data theft, and security breaches.”
Eighty-four percent of enterprises use cloud-based applications to support major business processes, and 82 percent allow employees to use their personal devices to access corporate data or applications. However, while cloud applications are part of their IT environments, 41 percent of respondents admitted they are unable to manage them as part of their identity and access management strategy. In addition, just 41 percent said they have a process in place to automatically remove mission-critical data from mobile devices.
In more bad news, 46 percent said they are not confident in their ability to grant or revoke employee access across their entire IT infrastructure.
“There’s no denying it, cloud and mobile technologies are becoming mainstream,” Gilbert added. “But, as our survey indicates, enterprises are still ‘catching up’ to the required levels of oversight and control they need.”
The survey can be read here.
*Headline adjusted to better reflect content in report