December 6, 2012, We are please to announce the release of the Third Annual Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy & Data Security, sponsored by ID Experts.
December 5, 2012
We are pleased to present the results of the 2013 State of the Endpoint study sponsored by Lumension® and conducted by Ponemon Institute. Since 2010, we have tracked endpoint risk in organizations, the resources to address the risk and the technologies deployed to manage threats.
Ponemon Institute is pleased to present the results from its annual Most Trusted Companies for Privacy Study. The study tracks consumers’ rankings of organizations that collect and manage their personal information. Now in its seventh year, the research identifies the overall top performing companies and industries perceived by consumers to be most trusted for their privacy practices. (Click to download)
Last week with CA Technologies we issued the results of a study of cloud service providers and their views on cloud security. There has been a lot of interest in this study. Readers have reviewed the results and responded with some very good questions and comments. In a nutshell, people – including us – were surprised by the results, which showed that cloud providers didn’t put security as the No. 1 concern in providing their services.
As a result, we have had some questions about “who” we polled for this study beyond the information provided in the study. People were curious as to whether or not we had some of the large public cloud providers in our study, and I will try to clear things up here.
Our unit of analysis is the IT practitioner who self-reported that he or she is employed by organizations that provide cloud services. As a member of the Council of American Survey Research Organizations (CASRO), we uphold strict data confidentiality, privacyand ethical research standards. Therefore, we do not collect any personally identifiable information or company identifiable information in our research. However, as shown below , we do ask respondents to report such demographics as the approximate size of their organizations using employee headcount and their organizational level.
Table 6 , taken from our report, shows that 58 percent of respondents from the U.S. work in organizations with more than 1,000 employees, and 50 percent of respondents work in companies of that size for the Europe sample. The respondents represented both large and small service providers. While we do not collect company identifiable information about the cloud providers and cannot tell you their names, based on responses we had representation from very large organizations.
Table 6: Worldwide headcount of respondents’ organization?
US
Europe
Less than 500 people
23%
29%
500 to 1,000 people
19%
21%
1,001 to 5,000 people
28%
16%
5,001 to 10,000 people
20%
27%
10,001 to 25,000 people
4%
0%
25,001 to 75,000 people
4%
0%
More than 75,000 people
2%
7%
Total
100%
100%
As you can see from Table 3 below, also from our report, we started with a broad pool to get a statistically significant response rate that is representative of the population of IT practitioners working in organizations providing cloud computing services. Most of our respondents were directors, managers, supervisors or technicians – so folks in the trenches, watching how things operate day-to-day, on up to management (see Table 4 below).
Further respondent data includes:
Table 3: Sample response
US
Europe
Organizations
1,180
263
Contacts made (by phone)
879
240
Returned surveys
130
32
Rejections for reliability
27
8
Final sample
103
24
And
Table 4: Respondents’ organizational level
US
Europe
Senior Executive
2%
5%
Vice President
2%
5%
Director
28%
30%
Manager
16%
22%
Supervisor
10%
0%
Staff or technician
39%
26%
Contractor or other
3%
12%
Total
100%
100%
This isn’t our first look at cloud security and I’m sure it won’t be the last as we move forward into the shifting computing paradigm. And as we continue our work, the Ponemon Institute willoperate with the utmost integrity and transparency as we help industry uncover the emerging trends affecting the security and privacy sector.
