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.