The enterprise security time bomb

Companies are at serious risk of data security breaches as 38 percent of U.S. office workers admit to storing work documents on personal cloud tools and services, according to Huddle.

Almost a fifth (16 percent) of the 2,000 office workers that were surveyed use Dropbox to store work documents, while Google Drive and Apple iCloud came in second and third place with 15 percent and 12 percent respectively. With 91 percent of workers also stating that they use personal devices to store, share, access or work on company documentation, organizations are at risk of losing data and intellectual property forever as it becomes fragmented across multiple devices and cloud services.

Regarding personal devices, almost two thirds (64 percent) of office workers use external hard drives to store work documents and almost half (46 percent) use USB drives. More than a third (34 percent) of people admit to using USBs to share documentation with others and 43 percent use external personal hard drives for the same purpose. Even CDs and DVDS continue to be used by almost a fifth of people (16 percent) for storing company documents.

With a wealth of digital content being created and shared on a daily basis, the ways in which companies ensure their data is stored, accessed and worked on by employees – without compromising security – is becoming a significant issue. To deal with the information overload now occurring in enterprises, it is clear that many office workers are turning to personal gadgets and services to help them get their jobs done more effectively.

Half of U.S office workers want to be able to work from anywhere and almost half (49 percent) wanted to access all of their work documents in one place. A fifth of U.S. workers also want to use their personal smartphones, laptops and tablets for work. Today’s enterprise technology now needs to be able to support these requirements without putting company information at risk.

Huddle’s report reveals that office workers across the U.S. feel overwhelmed by the amount of content – whether documents, discussions on social tools, images or video – that they work with on a daily basis. More than half of U.S office workers (53 percent) feel bombarded by all the information they sometimes have to deal with, with those aged between 18 – 24 years old feeling the pressure most (60 percent). The 25 – 31 year olds and 32 – 38 years olds are in joint second place with 57 percent feeling overwhelmed.

According to the research, technology adds to people’s frustrations in the office as key annoyances are:

• Not being able to send large files via email (31 percent)
• Wasting time searching for electronic documents (28 percent)
• Ensuring that you are using the most up to date version of any given document (21 percent)
• Getting documents approved by others (18 percent)
• Figuring out who has specific information about a project or task (17 percent).

In order to share and work on documents with people outside of their company:

• Almost two thirds (65 percent) of office workers continue to revert to sending email attachments
• Nearly a fifth (16 percent) use USB drives
• A similar amount (15 percent) send hard copies of documents via courier
• Eight percent send CDs or DVDs via mail.