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NEW UK STUDY SHOWS BUSINESS LEADERS UNAWARE OF HOW MUCH SENSITIVE DATA IS LEAVING THEIR ORGANISATION

Portable devices are the biggest concern to organisations in terms of confidential information leakage

London September 18, 2006 The majority of businesses in the UK have no idea how much sensitive data is leaking out of their organisations, and worse yet, have no automated method for finding and preventing those leaks, according to a new study released today by Workshare, the leading provider of secure content compliance solutions. Leaking information via portable devices (e.g. USB sticks, iPods, BlackBerrys) is seen as the biggest concern to organisations, highlighting the growing concern around information security and compliance within todays mobile workplace. The lack of awareness and automation comes despite an understanding that these leaks put customer loyalty and retention at risk, as well as impact regulatory compliance, brand reputation, and financial/stock price performance.

The industry-wide study, sponsored by Workshare and conducted by independent market researchers Loudhouse, collected data from 200 senior security and risk professionals including large organisations in the UK. The study paints a distressing picture because even though respondents consider privacy and information security a top concern, the study reveals a significant lack of information and awareness about the level of risk to confidential information. Findings include:

The top three sources of risk for information leaks were portable devices (75%), email attachments (63%) and email content (59%), and form the basis of most companies’ concerns.
With an average of 76% of respondents concerned, or extremely concerned about malicious breaches of information security, it shows parity within the sample between pre-mediated and inadvertent information leaks. Disgruntled employees and corporate espionage are not common, yet all employees distribute sensitive information every hour of the day with no real protection mechanism in place to protect inadvertent information leakage. It appears that the risk associated with this seemingly benign task is something large businesses are only now beginning to take seriously.
Only half of those surveyed admitted they are concerned about valuable information being leaked, whether it occurred intentionally or inadvertently, This is worrying despite well publicised information leakages.
Only 43% of respondents felt that they had adequate policy enforcement solutions in place for information security compliance. This causes concern because one has to question the value of a policy if it is not enforced.
Many organisations (73%) do not believe that converting a document to PDF makes it secure for distribution. However, PDF remains the most common format for many important documents to be made available for sharing or placed online. This is potentially exposing confidential information (e.g. the recent exposure of blocked out information from a PDF report by the National Audit Office on the NPfIT programme).

Andrew Pearson, Executive Vice President EMEA, Workshare, said, Todays workforce is increasingly mobile and so it is critical that organisations put policies and systems in place to ensure that information can not be leaked via email, attachments or portable devices such as USB sticks, MP3 players or mobile devices. The fact that many organisations have no automated way of enforcing data leak policies is shocking. A landslide of recent leaks at the Veterans Affairs, AT&T, Google, National Audit Office and other leading organisations and agencies cannot serve as a better wake up call. In todays regulatory and legal climate, executives can ill afford to simply run on the faith that employees will do the right thing, or worse, wont make a simple mistake that exposes critical information.

The Workshare Information Risk survey was conducted in August 2006 by Loudhouse Research, an independent market research consultancy based in the UK. Commissioned by Workshare, the report petitioned 200 security and risk professionals in organisations of 1000+ employees in the UK, Germany, Japan and Australia. All respondents in the survey were responsible for information security, risk or compliance with Financial Services, Retail, Public Sector and Business Services sectors.

About Workshare
Workshare, an Information Security company, delivers Secure Content Compliance solutions to over 5,500 organizations worldwide. Workshare solutions uniquely combine policy enforcement, management control and user education to ensure safe information exchange without business disruption. Its products include Workshare Protect Enterprise Suite, Workshare Professional, DeltaView and TRACE! Workshare’s customer base spans small to large organizations in every industry segment with more than 58 percent of the Fortune 1000 and 85 percent of the ProServices 250. Over 900,000 professionals in 65 countries use Workshare software. The company has offices in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Washington DC, London, Frankfurt, Paris and Sydney. Workshare is the sponsor of www.metadatarisk.org, the definitive source for content security. For more information, visit www.workshare.com.