Europe lacks data centre security

Research suggests European businesses do not consider datacentre security as a top priority

70 per cent of respondents admitted their lost data was not encrypted

Datacentre security is not considered a top priority among European businesses, according to research released by storage vendor Brocade.

The research found that half of the respondents had experienced attacks this year, with 70 per cent of those admitting that the lost data was not encrypted.

Furthermore, of the companies that had experienced data breaches 82 per cent said encryption technologies could have mitigated their risk.

Mike Murphy, director of marketing for EMEA at Brocade, said: “The most mission critical corporate data resides within the datacentre and should require a robust, non-disruptive, fabric-based data security strategy to avoid damaging breaches.

“While more than three quarters of businesses agree that a data loss would be catastrophic, this survey illustrates that not enough is being done to protect critical assets.”

The research was conducted on 4,500 senior European IT decision makers in the UK, France and Germany during the tail end of 2008.

Jon Oltsik, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), said: “The amount of sensitive information continues to grow precipitously, so organisations need a broader deployment of encryption technologies across data centres in order to protect data confidentiality and privacy.

“Specific to storage, these security and privacy demands require an architectural approach for enterprise-wide encryption of data at rest while enabling end-to-end management for the secure flow of data across multiple fabrics.”