As organisations push forward with digital initiatives, protecting sensitive consumer data has become the main driver for more than half (54 per cent) of businesses deploying encryption tools.

Research from nCipher Security, based on a survey of 6,457 IT professionals in 17 countries carried out by the Ponemon Institute, found that the arrival of GDPR has pushed data protection to the top of the agenda of encryption activity for the first time, outranking compliance, which ranked fourth.

The survey, now in its fifteenth year, showed that employee mistakes continue to be the biggest threat to sensitive data (54 per cent), significantly outweighing concerns over attacks by hackers (29 per cent), or malicious insiders (20 per cent).

In contrast, the least significant threats cited include government eavesdropping (11 per cent) and lawful data requests (12 per cent).

With the proliferation of data from digital initiatives, cloud use, mobility, Internet of Things (IoT) devices and the advent of 5G networks, data discovery continues to be the biggest challenge in planning and executing a data encryption strategy, with 67 per cent of respondents citing this as their top concern.

The analysis said that with the arrival of COVID-19, this trend for encryption is likely to increase, with the surge in employees working remotely, using data at home, creating extra copies on personal devices and cloud storage.

Overall levels of encryption in organisations rose to 48 per cent in 2020, up from 45 per cent in 2019. When it comes to the encryption technologies firms are exploring to achieve this, 60 per cent of organisations said they plan to use blockchain, with cryptocurrency/wallets, asset transactions, identity, supply chain and smart contracts cited as the top use cases.

However, when it came to more advanced uses for encryption tech, most IT professionals saw the mainstream adoption of multi-party computation at least five years away, with mainstream adoption of homomorphic encryption more than six years away, and quantum resistant algorithms likely to come on-stream over eight years from now.

The highest prevalence of organisations with an enterprise encryption strategy was in Germany (66 per cent), followed by the United States (66 per cent), Sweden (62 per cent), Hong Kong (60 per cent), Netherlands (56 per cent) and the United Kingdom (54 per cent).

Payment-related data (54 per cent of respondents) and financial records (54 per cent of respondents) were the most likely data sources to be encrypted.

Meanwhile, industries seeing the most significant increase in extensive encryption usage were manufacturing (49 per cent), hospitality (44 per cent) and consumer products (43 per cent).

The use of hardware security modules (HSMs) continues to grow, with 48 per cent of respondents deploying HSMs for both data and applications.

The demand for trusted encryption for new digital initiatives has driven significant HSM growth for big data encryption (up 17 per cent) code signing (up 12 per cent), IoT root of trust (up 10 per cent) and document signing (up 7 per cent). Additionally, 35 per cent of respondents reported using HSMs to secure access to public cloud applications.

Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of Ponemon Institute, said: “Consumers expect brands to keep their data safe from breaches and have their best interests at heart - the survey found that IT leaders are taking this seriously, with protection of consumer data cited as the top driver of encryption growth for the first time.”

He added that encryption use is at an all-time high with 48 per cent of respondents this year saying their organisation has an overall encryption plan applied consistently across the entire enterprise, and a further 39 per cent having a limited plan or strategy applied to certain application and data types.

John Grimm ,vice president of strategy at nCipher Security, explained: “As the world goes digital, the impact of the global pandemic highlights how security and identity have become critical for organisations and individuals both at work and at home."

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