I once had a teacher who admitted that she’d happily take a bribe for a better grade, but the bribe would have to be big enough for her to retire to an island in the pacific. Not much of a realistic possibility for high school students, but, according to new data, about half of all IT professionals have the same policy, and the people who’d be willing to bribe them probably have enough to make white sandy beach retirement possible.
According to the 2013 Market Pulse Survey (which you can read here—pdf warning), forty five per cent of all employees would sell data for the right price. Some other gems include:
- 50% admitted that they’d seen or read company documents that they should not have.
- 46% of IT executives believe that their company doesn’t have good internal controls over data; the same number lacks confidence in their ability to revoke access when an employee leaves an organization.
- 53% of companies admitted that they’d seen a security breach, and 51% admit that it’s “just a matter of time” before they experience another.
- Critical issues identified include inability to see the whole picture across all systems (according to 45%), overreliance on IT support (43%), and inability to handle new technology (43%).
- Whilst 82% of companies allow employees to use their own devices, only 41% remove critical file when an employee leaves.
Sober figures indeed. The age of ubiquitous thumb drives, cloud computing, and Edward Snowdon has provoked the question of how much access to give employees and how to manage said access. Judging by the survey, not many people are quite sure what the answer should be.
___
Photo courtesy of Bob Mical.
