Biometrics among critical data at major risk, say 30 percent of U.S. executives

More than 30 percent of executives in the U.S. fear critical employee and company data, including biometric details, are vulnerable to hackers, because their organizations are not doing enough to protect it in the first place, found Dell’s 2019 Workplace Security Report, conducted by Vanson Bourne on 4,600 executives from 42 countries.

Many companies are struggling to secure their infrastructures against both external data breaches and imminent insider threats such as negligent employees falling for phishing schemes. Even though enterprises process high-volume data troves on a daily basis, the report says they lack strong security strategies to protect valuable information.

According to the report, enterprises handled about 9.70 petabytes of data in 2018, compared to just 1.45 petabytes in 2016. The demanding and challenging task to secure such high-volume data management falls on the executives’ plate. However, 49 percent of executives “believe their organization will struggle to prove it’s trustworthiness within the next five years.” The most concerned leaders are in South Korea (51 percent) and Singapore (42 percent), followed by Belgium (38 percent) and France (37 percent).

One of the highest vulnerabilities in any system is the traditional password. Having to regularly change and memorize a complex series of letters, numbers and signs is a hassle, something not many want to deal with as they need to focus on other business-critical tasks. As many as 88 percent of executives are bothered by this practice, and claim to often write the password down or use their name or familiar numbers to ensure they remember it.

According to the Biometric Usage Survey carried out online on 1,050 adult respondents, 64 percent would immediately adopt biometric authentication, if it was an option. 79 percent say that “having security features built into their business PCs help keep company data safe.”

HID Global recently acquired PKI provider HydrantID to boost its enterprise data security business.

Article Topics

access management  |  authentication  |  biometric data  |  biometrics  |  data protection  |  enterprise  |  privacy