Research published this week suggests that a sizable proportion of British businesses don’t have the skills or funds to keep their data secure.
There are lots of factors that might make an organisation unwilling to embrace digitalisation, choosing instead to keep documents in paper form and eschewing the benefits that scanning them would provide.
For instance, they might be concerned it’ll disrupt their employees’ efficiency by enforcing new working habits. Equally, they might just be daunted by the administrative costs involved in digitising multiple years’ worth of data.
A study published this week throws a further issue into the mix. According to a survey conducted by Trend Micro, a quarter (25 per cent) of British businesses admit they don’t have the resources they need to tackle information security effectively, whether in terms of existing employees’ skillsets, training or funds. Furthermore, there’s a notable discrepancy in that 64 per cent of respondents said they wanted to improve their skills in this field, which suggests UK organisations know full well how important keeping data safe can be.
These statistics are "alarming", argued Michael Darlington, technical director at Trend Micro. "British businesses are struggling to keep their virtual systems secure and our latest report finds that a lack of training and education is the main contributor to this issue," he commented.
Cyber attacks are a very real threat for many organisations, so it’s a major concern that a sizable proportion acknowledge there are obvious deficiencies in the way they handle security. Last month, law firm EMW revealed that the number of UK High Court disputes over data theft reached a record high of 167 in 2012 – a 58 per cent increase year on year. These weren’t necessarily sophisticated breaches, either – if digitalised sensitive assets aren’t properly secured, it’s easy for a disgruntled employee to walk away with them on a USB flash drive.
Collectively, these issues suggest that a third-party electronic document management solution might be a better choice for many businesses than to handle information security in house. Without the requisite know-how in the workforce, or the funds to acquire it, they might be setting themselves up for a fall otherwise.