A recent survey on file transfer services has shown that although businesses agree that security is “critical,” some industries are lagging far behind in setting up security systems.
Infosecurity Magazine reports that a survey conducted by software company Biscom revealed that at the very least, industries across the country are unanimous in their belief that security is a core component of their file transfer systems. A good 70% of respondents, which included representatives from the healthcare, financial, retail, technology, and manufacturing industries, among others, said that security was the most important thing to them when looking for file transfer services. A full 72% said security was “critical” for cloud-based services such as Google Drive and Dropbox.
“Our survey confirmed what we were already starting to see: that security will be the key focus in all areas of business for 2015,” said Bill Ho, the CEO of Biscom. “The data breaches within the past year have shown us that all businesses are increasingly at risk and should be actively assessing tools and processes which can help reduce their exposure.”
The study gave clues as to why security breaches are spiking. Roughly 86% of respondents claim to use email to transfer files and 51% claim to use file transfer protocol (FTP). Though 60% say they use secure file transfer protocol (SFTP) to transfer files, that is apparently not enough to prevent significant hacking cases.
Of all the industries surveyed, healthcare is the most vulnerable to breaching. About 81% of organizations in the medical industry still use email to share files, and 45% still use FTP.
Moreover, half of respondents who viewed cloud security features as “critical” use consumer-based services such as Dropbox, which, when compared to private cloud services, are fairly susceptible to hacking. Many of those who use such services store sensitive information: 82% store office documents, 34% for financial documents, 51% for medical records, and 40% for legal documents.
Regardless of the industry, American businesses are increasingly at risk for security breaches and data loss. Nearly 70% of businesses will experience data loss at some point due to system failure, hacking, or hardware damage.