Majority of UK firms 'hit by one or more data breach' in last year

2009-07-09

Seven out of ten (70 per cent) UK organisations have been impacted by one or more data breach incidents in the last year, according to research.

This is up from 60 per cent in the previous year, according to the 2009 Annual Study: UK Enterprise Encryption Trends study by the Ponemon Institute, commissioned by PGP Corporation.

The survey, which polled IT security professionals at 615 enterprises and public sector organisations, also showed that 12 per cent of respondents admitted to more than five data loss incidents in the twelve month period, accounting for an increase of nine per cent from the previous year.

"While the number of breaches is growing, there is increasing appetite for solutions that can alleviate the costly and time consuming task of managing encryption keys across the whole of the organisation," said Dr Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of the Ponemon Institute.

Randy George, writing for InformationWeek, recently asserted that data loss incidents can be particularly costly.

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