Survey reveals cyber security habits are getting worse

Of the 1,600 global employees surveyed, 75% of respondents admitted to reusing passwords across accounts, including work and personal, compared to 56% who admitted to doing so in 2014, when SailPoint first posed the question.

Organisations are at varying stages of the digital transformation, and that evolution has presented an increasingly complex IT environment to manage securely. Yet this years’ Market Pulse Survey findings points to a workforce who are less committed to security best practices. This has not only introduced more risk, but also a sense of frustration between the IT team trying to secure and enable the business and users who want to work more efficiently.

Over half (55%) of survey respondents stated their IT department can be a source of inconvenience in their organsation. This leads to employees skirting IT policies, such as the 31% who admitted that they have deployed software without IT’s help (i.e. ‘Shadow IT’).

Efforts to get around IT may not necessarily be done with malicious intent, but the reality is they directly increase IT risk for the organisation. For example, 13% of employees admitted they would not immediately notify their IT department if they thought they had been hacked.

Further compounding this issue is a workforce that tends not to understand the role of all employees in keeping an organisation secure, as 49% of respondents would actually blame the IT department for a cyber attack if one occurred as a result of an employee being hacked. 

However, it’s not just today’s employees exposing organisations to risk. As the digital transformation blurs the traditional security perimeter with cloud apps, it is also redefining the definition of a 'user'. Enterprises are increasingly adopting software bots powered by Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and granting them access to mission-critical applications and data, like their human counterparts.

Nearly half (48%) of respondents are currently using or planning to use chatbots and artificial intelligence personal assistants, with more than one tenth (13%) already using these in their organisation to increase their work efficiency. 

“To secure and enable today’s modern workforce, the users have become the new ‘security perimeter’ and their digital identities are the common link across an organisation’s IT ecosystem at every stage of its digital transformation,” said Juliette Rizkallah, CMO, SailPoint.

“By taking an identity-centric approach to security, IT can gain full visibility and control into which applications and data that users, including both human and non-human bots, are accessing to do their jobs. This approach allows enterprises of all sizes to confidently address the tension between enablement and security exposed in our Market Pulse Survey.”

To learn more about how an identity-centric approach to security can help global enterprises address the issues highlighted in this year’s Market Pulse Survey, please join the webinar 'Balancing Efficiency and Security in Today’s Enterprises' on 29th November, 2018 at 10:00am CT. Register here.