How proactive are companies when managing data?

33 percent of U.S. companies are not proactively putting in place systems to monitor, warehouse and protect their internal data, despite growing international regulations mandating it and heightened legal risks associated with data theft, a BigID and ServiceNow report reveals.

The joint study also found that American companies don’t tackle the issue of data management in a unified way. Instead, the responsibility is overseen by a mix of corporate offices, including legal, compliance and risk-management, which can lead to a failure to assess threats or to look at data management in a cohesive way.

“Data privacy and protection strategies not only play a critical role in upkeeping the health of an organization but also minimize the legal maelstrom of non-regulatory compliance,” said Heather Federman, Chief Privacy Officer at BigID.

“Companies are compelled to invest in a data privacy infrastructure that incorporates privacy by design by sorting through its vast stores of data.”

“Consistent, reliable, policy-driven workflows are essential for organizations to scale with the privacy demands in our hybrid world of work,” said Vasant Balasubramanian, VP and GM of the Risk Business Unit at ServiceNow.

100 IT professionals were surveyed to gauge the importance of data security to their organizations and what strategies they’re employing to ensure it. Below are other details from the survey:

• Excel sheets were still the most used tool to manage data privacy and compliance with 53 percent of respondents reported relying on it. The heavy reliance on manual tools is slowing down the ability to proactively manage sensitive and regulated data.
• Organizations are struggling to maintain an accurate data inventory across their data landscape. 40 percent of respondents are simply scanning and identifying data in structured sources, while 12 percent have yet to analyze data in both structured and unstructured locations.
• “Data privacy and governance” and “assessing and managing risk” were the main goals driving privacy initiatives within organizations with 78 percent and 74 percent of respondents reporting them respectively.