A full 70% of compliance professionals are confident that their organizations are well or very well prepared to fend off attacks by hackers.
At the same time, a disturbing 61% believe that an accidental data breach by an employee is very or somewhat likely and 41% feel the same way about accidental breaches by third-party vendors, according to a survey of 500 compliance professionals by the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics and the Health Care Compliance Association.
"The fears over unintentional breaches suggest that employees and vendors still don't fully understand the need to safeguard data and, despite training, people will still make mistakes. Further training and hard controls that make it more difficult to share data are necessary", said Roy Snell, chief executive officer of both organizations.
The survey found that 82% of respondents had invested more time on the issue of data privacy compliance in the previous year. This investment is expected to continue with 77% of respondents indicating that they expect time spent on data protection and privacy to increase further during the next year.
“This is clearly a long-term challenge for compliance professionals and business. Business will continue to invest time and resources in ensuring that what's meant to stay private truly does stay private", Snell added.