Storage Security Grows in Importance for Financial Services, HealthCare, and Government Industries

NeoScale Systems, the independent leader in enterprise storage security solutions, announced the results of a primary research study of large enterprises recently completed by the Taneja Group, a leading technology analyst firm. The study revealed storage security as a top five spending priority among new enterprise security initiatives. The study validates NeoScale's innovations in global key management and encryption of data at rest.

Of the respondents in the study, 68 percent rated storage security a top five concern, with nearly 30 percent rating it as a number one priority. In addition, Global key management is a concern, with 54 percent of users surveyed considering deploying a global key management system in the next 12 months.

"Storage security has arrived. Our research clearly indicates that the visibility and understanding of the need to protect data at rest has increased dramatically over the past 18 months," said Steve Norall, senior analyst, Taneja Group. "NeoScale Systems has emerged as an early thought leader in driving end users to think about the role of key management as they scale and manage their secured storage environments."

The Taneja Group surveyed 116 large enterprises, with financial services sector (31 percent) being the highest concentration, followed by healthcare (17 percent), and government (14 percent). The survey results reveal the forces driving their purchasing and deployment decisions around storage security, how storage security ranked in importance compared to other IT initiatives and how end users plan to evolve their storage security infrastructure to meet the new realities imposed by compliance and data privacy regulations.

Other Key Research Findings:

Storage Security Devices Are Proliferating Rapidly
More than 53 percent of respondents have deployed at least 100 or more storage security devices.

Compliance and Data Privacy Concerns Are Key Drivers for Storage Security
Regulatory compliance (65 percent of respondents) and data privacy concerns and liabilities (57percent of respondents) ranked as the leading drivers influencing investment in storage security.

Storage Security Breaches Are Costly
More than 57 percent of respondents estimated that a single storage security breach would cost their organization over $500,000 USD, not factoring in all soft costs such as damage to reputation and brand.

Management of Disparate Key Systems is a Major Problem
The research uncovered that overall management of heterogeneous storage devices and their keys is a challenge for IT since each individual storage device introduces a disparate key management system that users must administer and learn. The Taneja Group predicts that global key management will evolve to become a non-optional element of any large enterprise's storage security infrastructure.

The comprehensive Taneja Group primary research study analyzing the state and direction of storage security deployments in large enterprises can be viewed on NeoScale's website at :
http://www.neoscale.com/English/Registration/RP_Taneja.html