07, May 2016: A report published by Verizonin April revealed that 89% of business data breaches had a financial or espionage motive. The Verizon 2016 Data Breach Investigations Report assessed over 64,000 data breach incidents in 82 countries. It identified that 63% of confirmed data breaches involved leveraging weak, default or stolen passwords.

With phishingas the root cause of the most data breaches,it’s clear that staff awareness of data security is lacking,particularly in the public sector which suffered by far the largest number of data breaches — some 70% of the 64,000 incidents occurred within public sector organisations.

Data securityis very much in the public eye, so the requirement for large organisations to take major precautionary measures against data breaches has never been so pressing.

Computer Weekly reports that most data stored by organisations is not classified or tagged; “UK and European companies' data is overwhelmingly useless, and more than half of it (54%) comprises so-called dark data that is not identified and may contain non-compliant data”.

As well as the potential of being non-compliant, this lack of classification means that confidential informationcould be at risk from theft or even accidental leakage. This includes confidential organisational data and, worse, private customer data such as passwords andpersonal details.

But what can be done to protect these valuable assets?

Data classification enables an organisation to categorise data based on its level of sensitivity. Boldon James Classifier is one of the leading solutions in this area.

The Boldon James solution provides a range of optionsin its data classification Suite thatgive businesses the power to classify(and to secure) their most sensitive data at source, whether that be data stored in emails, documents or in the Cloud.

According to research from Boldon James and Bloor Research, data classification now ranks in the top three security controls for protecting data.

Martin Sugden, Managing Director of Boldon James said: “Data classification is being seen as more and more critical to organisations as it improves the performance and return on investment of other security technologies such as DLP and rights management. It’s encouraging to see that one of the top drivers for implementing data classification projects is to follow best practice as a primary way to increase user awareness of data security. In terms of user awareness, data classification helps to ensure employees are more aware of the type of information they are dealing with and its value, as well as their obligations in protecting it to prevent data loss.”

For further reading visit the Boldon James website. The company provides a range of free resources on its website to encourage data security learning.

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