Survey: App Data Security Top Concern

WOODLAND HILLS, Calif. -- Gamma Enterprise Technologies, creator of InfoShuttle® and a leading global provider of application data management software solutions for companies running SAP® applications, today announced the results of a survey of SAP users worldwide about their methods of protecting sensitive data in non-production environments. The results of this survey highlight the vulnerabilities of highly confidential information and raise questions on current strategies to protect this data.

Exposure of Sensitive Data in Non-Production Environments

The survey shows that nearly 70 percent of the 175 respondents across 23 countries are worried about the overall exposure of sensitive data in non-production environments. Of these respondents, over three-quarters are apprehensive about the security of their employee and customer records. Over 80 percent are fearful about the security of financial transaction documents and just over half see the protection of sales and purchase orders as a concern.

Yet despite this fact, most survey participants have no plans to increase protection practices to better secure this data in development and test settings. In fact, two-thirds of survey respondents say their organizations do not plan to manage the issue by implementing third party data security solutions. Most say their organizations rely on in-house “home-grown” solutions (30 percent), which provide basic masking for some sensitive data fields or SAP’s standard security measures (64 percent), which are typically used to provide access control for SAP production systems.

With reports showing that over 167 million data records with sensitive personal information have been compromised in the past two years alone (and those are only the reported cases), security is of the utmost concern across all industries. Because non-production environments leverage “real data” to test applications, they house some of the most classified information in an organization— including employee records, customer records, and financial transaction documents. Yet, non-production environments are generally exposed with little or no logging and monitoring, and these systems are often made available for remote access, and as a result, they are difficult to secure.

Gamma Enterprise Technologies Inc.