A Ponemon Institute global survey on encryption trends found IoT to be one of the biggest drivers of encryption uptake in Australia.
The top use cases for Australia were public cloud services (49 percent, up from 32 percent last year), IoT devices (31 percent from 22 percent over the past two years) and Docker containers (26 percent, up from 19 percent last year).
For the third year the study also tracked the deployment of encryption of IoT devices and platforms/data repositories.
Globally, 61 percent of respondents said encryption for IoT platforms/data repositories had been at least partially deployed, and 60 percent said encryption for IoT devices had been at least partially deployed.
Australia at odds on encryption priorities
Overall the survey found Australia at odds with other countries on the priorities for deploying encryption.
Ponemon gathered inputs from more than 6000 respondents in 17 countries for its 2020 Global Encryption Trends Study, sponsored by nCipher Security and Entrust Datacard. The Australian results are published separately
It found, for the first time, protecting consumer personal information ranked the top global driver for deploying encryption, by 54 percent of respondents), outranking compliance, which came in fourth place being ranked top priority by 47 percent of respondents.
However, 57 percent of Australian organisations said regulatory compliance was their top driver for encrypting data and only 29 percent rated protecting customer personal information as their number one data protection priority, the lowest rate globally and 25 percent lower than the global average.
For the third straight year more respondents in Australia than in any other region say they encrypt data to comply with internal policies (43 percent versus 23 percent globally).
nCipher Security regional sales director for Australia, James Cook, said the result was not surprising. “There has been a raft of new regulations and regulatory changes impacting this market over the past couple of years such as Consumer Data Right (CDR), and a critical focus on the financial sector in particular, so it is only natural for respondents to have a keen focus on compliance.”
