New research from SailPoint, the identity governance platform, highlights how despite the prevalence of data breaches, the way employees approach security is getting worse as the supposed ‘technologically savvy’ millennials enter the workforce.
Of the 1,600 global employees surveyed, 75% of respondents admitted to reusing passwords across accounts, including work and personal, compared to 56% who admitted to doing so in 2014, when SailPoint first posed the question.
According to the study, this is likely down to organisation’s digital transformation efforts, as the evolution has brought with it an increasingly complex IT environment. This has introduced both more risk and a sense of frustration between the IT team trying to secure and enable the business and users who want to work more efficiently. Over half (55%) of survey respondents stated their IT department can be a source of inconvenience in their organisation. This leads to employees skirting IT policies, such as the 31% who admitted that they have deployed software without IT’s help (i.e. ‘Shadow IT’).
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Juliette Rizkallah, CMO, SailPoint, said: “To secure and enable today’s modern workforce, the users have become the new ‘security perimeter’, and their digital identities are the common link across an organisation’s IT ecosystem at every stage of its digital transformation.
“By taking an identity-centric approach to security, IT can gain full visibility and control into which applications and data that users, including both human and non-human bots, are accessing to do their jobs. This approach allows enterprises of all sizes to confidently address the tension between enablement and security exposed in our Market Pulse Survey.”
SailPoint’s research is based on the interviews with 1,600 employees at organisations with at least 1,000 employees across Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.
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