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Only 27% of Organizations Use Encryption
An anonymous reader writes "According to a Check Point survey of 224 IT and security administrators, over 40% of businesses in the last year have more remote users connecting to the corporate network from home or when traveling, compared to 2008. The clear majority (77%) of businesses have up to a quarter of their total workforce consisting of regular remote users. Yet, regardless of the growth in remote users, just 27% of respondents say their companies currently use hard disk encryption to protect sensitive data on corporate endpoints. In addition, only 9% of businesses surveyed use encryption for removable storage devices, such as USB flash drives. A more mobile workforce carrying large amounts of data on portable devices leaves confidential corporate data vulnerable to loss, theft and interception."
I telecommute and all my work is stored on the server I remote into.
As I have no work stored locally there is no encryption (aside from the VPN into the server).
There are corporate docs using Office 2003 DRM where I work. I'm literally the only person in a multi-national company that can read the docs because I'm the only one who applied the hotfix for the expired certificate.
IT can't or won't do it through the domain.
As a road warrior I should be using encryption, right? I would be a perfect candidate for it? And yet there is no way I will encrypt my laptop when I travel. The risk of losing access to the data when something goes wrong is far too dangerous to risk it. I have had problems on the road already, yet I have always managed to recover my data either from my laptop or from backups, but what happens when the decryption mechanism or the OS crashes? Carry another laptop? Carry bootable USB-based decryption tools? Sorry, too many variables, too much potential for trouble.
It all comes down to a simple calculation - what is the mathematical probability of someone stealing my drive vs. my OS or disk crashing?(1) Anyone who has traveled knows the second far outweighs the first.
(1) As long as it is unencrypted, you can still recover it relatively easily.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
That is a larger percentage then I expected. I wonder if the statistics were collected by asking people if they used it, and the percentages were more the amount of people who knew they should be.
There's one use for encryption people don't generally discuss: tech service.
I've been running a home server for a long time. Such systems over time accumulate years worth of mail, which will contain private data, website passwords, and so on. I personally feel uncomfortable with sending a disk containing years worth of data to a tech support department when I want to say, get it replaced under warranty. There have been a few stories about underpaid techs looking for music and porn on customers' hard drives. And if the disk is broken I can hardly erase it properly.
So my solution:
For servers, encrypt the disk, and keep the key in an USB drive always plugged into the server. If a disk breaks, I remove the disk, and send it for warranty replacement without worrying about the data.
For laptops, I use Ubuntu's disk encryption. It's even better there as laptops usually don't have RAID, and may break for multiple reasons that I can't personally fix.