In light of new Nevada law data privacy faces significant risk

Beginning October 1, Nevada state law will require all businesses to employ an encryption tool for any electronic transmission that includes a customer’s personal information. According to a new study entitled “Joint Research Report: Encryption Solution Implementation Landscape” conducted by Osterman Research on behalf of CertifiedMail, Nevada companies will be a step ahead when it comes to protecting customers’ personal data.

The study findings indicate that, despite the availability of easy-to-use encryption solutions, data privacy is still being compromised for a number of reasons.

Of the 205 enterprises surveyed, key findings include:

• 47% do not have the ability to send encrypted email directly from their desktop.
• Only 45% can send encrypted email manually through their email client.
• Only 13% can send encrypted emails automatically through some sort of policy-based encryption capability.
• Osterman Research found that 27% of organizations had experienced an accidental or malicious data leak during the previous 12 months.
• Among those respondents that can send a manually encrypted email, 22% found doing so somewhat difficult or difficult, while another 44% consider sending encrypted email manually to be “not too difficult”. Much of the belief that encrypted email is generally difficult to use arises from the legacy of difficult-to-use, difficult-to-manage and expensive infrastructures that were not scalable and caused other problems. While today’s encrypted email systems are substantially easier to use than early-generation systems, the legacy continues to hold true for many decision makers.
• The market of frequent encrypted email users – those who would be the primary drivers for the adoption of encrypted email in most organizations – comprise 18% of total email users. Occasional users, comprise another 31% of users, while infrequent users comprise the remaining roughly one-half (51%) of users.
• Survey respondents indicated that if encrypting an email could be accomplished by simply clicking a button in the email client, “infrequent” users would likely use encryption frequently for all types of communications, even those that contained only moderately sensitive content. Nearly one-half of users want to have automatic encryption capabilities.