Protecting consumer data is leading driver for encryption in Middle East: report

Protecting consumer personal information is the top driver for deploying encryption in the Middle East region, a new study by Entrust has found.

According to the ‘Middle East – Entrust 2020 Middle East Encryption Trends’ study by the data protection technology company, 67 per cent of respondents placed protecting consumer data above protecting intellectual property (59 per cent), protecting information against specific identified threats (40 per cent) and complying with external privacy or data security regulations (34 per cent).

The study says employee mistakes continue to be the biggest threat to sensitive data (60 per cent) and significantly outweigh concerns over attacks by hackers (32 per cent) or malicious insiders (19 per cent), but the threats posed by hackers has increased significantly from 25 per cent in 2019.

The study indicates that 78 per cent of respondents in the Middle East have adopted an encryption strategy which is either enterprise-wide or limited to particular deployments. This is lower than the global average of 87 per cent.

The study found that financial records (54 per cent) and intellectual property (52 per cent) are the most common types of data encrypted by Middle East organisations

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In the near term, 51 per cent of respondents plan to use blockchain for encryption, with cryptocurrency/wallets and asset transactions cited at the top use cases. Other much-hyped encryption technologies are not on IT organisations’ near-term radar. Most IT professionals see the mainstream adoption of multi-party computation at least five years away, with the mainstream adoption of homomorphic encryption more than six years away, and quantum-resistant algorithms over eight years out, all of which are in line with global trends.

Sixty percent of respondents say their organisations currently transfer sensitive or confidential data to the cloud and 27 per cent of respondents plan to do so in the next 12 to 24 months. The region also rates support for cloud and on-premises deployment (92 per cent) as the most important feature associated with encryption solutions, far ahead of the global average of 67 per cent.

“Organisations are under relentless pressure to deliver high security and seamless access to their customer data, business-critical information and applications while ensuring business continuity,” said Philip Schreiber, regional sales director-Data Protection Solutions, for Entrust.

“The 2020 Global Encryption Trends Study shows the Middle East’s focus on protecting customer information and intellectual property to be much higher than the global average, which is laudable and shows the region setting benchmarks in this regard.”