Last week, Thales Group, a French multination Aerospace conglomerate, published its report ‘Trends in Encryption and Data Security’ for the retail industry. The report revealed many consequential findings including one that has caused the US’s retail industry to worry. The report stated that retail businesses in the US are ‘spending more, and enjoying it less’. Evidently, the 84% of U.S. retail respondents are increasing their budget on IT security this year, as compared to the 77% from last year. However, they are planning to spend ‘the most on defences deemed least effective’.

For example, 72% of the businesses in the US retail industry, are planning on increasing their spending on endpoint defenses, which most security experts have claimed to have the least effectiveness. Contrary to this, the most effective cybersecurity solutions, that involve the protection of data-at-rest and data-in-motion, were ranked by US retailers as least of their concerns.

Source: 2018 Thales data-threat report

It is notable that the increased use of IoT and cloud solutions, such as SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS, has led to the gradual decrease in the significance of end-point solutions. Proportionately, these IT trends have also increased the importance of data security solutions.

Furthermore, the overall increase in the cybersecurity budget has been accounted to the data breaches, which 50% of the respondents suffered last year. Adding to this, 49% of the respondents have even affirmed their present vulnerability to data attacks. It is indeed chaotic as most businesses are still planning on spending their cybersecurity budget on the least effective solutions, instead of focusing on the real problems they are facing.

The barriers in Data security

Instead of letting the mystery unravel itself, the researchers have shared their findings with the participants and collected more data on the barriers that are have kept from spending on more secure data protection solutions. To this, the response from US retailers was more disturbing when compared to the global perception of those barriers. More specifically, most businesses from across the globe and from varied industries have accounted their lack of spending in data security to somewhat practical reasons like the complexity of the present solutions (43%) and concerns over business performance (42%). However, the most highly cited reasons among the US retailers for their lack of spending in data security solutions is the presumed lack of need (52%)!

Evidently, raising awareness for data protection should therefore be the most significant step for the US cybersecurity experts, to bring any significant improvement in the prevalent conditions. Hopefully, policies and regulations like GDPR can bring more clarity to the issue amongst the wary businesses.

Resources:

http://go.thalesesecurity.com/rs/480-LWA-970/images/2018-Thales-Data-Threat-Report-Retail-Edition-ar.pdf

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/why-the-retail-industry-is-spending-money-on-the-wrong-cybersecurity-solutions/