A recent SailPoint Market Pulse survey of more than 3,400 employees in the United States, Great Britain and Australia, found that many are willing to disclose classified, sensitive, or proprietary corporate information after they have resigned or been laid off. SailPoint is a market-leading identity governance solution company that helps the world’s largest organizations to mitigate risk, reduce IT costs and ensure compliance. In Great Britain, an alarming 24% of employees with access said they would feel comfortable selling proprietary data for profit, compared with only 5 and 4% for Americans and Australians, respectively. In fact, British employees yielded the highest percentages for many of the questions when asked if they would feel comfortable doing something with the data, whether it be forwarding electronic files to a non-employee, or copying files and taking them with them when they left. “Organizations should be very concerned about the number of employees that openly admitted to misusing proprietary data,” said Jackie Gilbert, vice president of marketing and cofounder at SailPoint. “These results show that insider threats represent a significant risk to the business. Some of the biggest and most costly data breaches have been directly tied to company employees. Having a written policy is not enough to ensure data security. Organizations need to have automated controls in place to monitor and manage user access controls in order to minimize the risk of insider theft or sabotage.”
