Remote Work Exacerbating Data Sprawl

Remote Work Exacerbating Data Sprawl
More than three-quarters of IT executives worry that data sprawl puts their data at risk, especially with employees working from insecure home networks, survey finds.

IT executives increasingly worry about the extent to employees have saved their company's data in unprotected devices or sent sensitive information through insecure services, according to a survey released by data-governance firm Egnyte last week.


The survey, conducted in August, found that more than three-quarters of CIOs had concerns about content sprawl, with 38% very concerned about the issue. While the degree of data sprawl often depends on the department, the rapid move to remote work because of the coronavirus pandemic has become the No. 1 reason cited by CIOs for data replicating to insecure environments.


Employees may copy data to their home systems, even if those systems are not maintained or visible to the company, says Kris Lahiri, chief technology officer of Egnyte.


"In a lot of cases, the worker has problems getting stuff done, so they take an easier solution, whether it was insecurely sending something over email or a personal device," he says. "People needs to realize that basic digital hygiene is important to visit."


Then survey underscores that the skyrocketing growth in data stored and used by companies has made it harder to keep important and sensitive information secure, while at the same time, allowing access to the information to authorized users.  


Nearly half of the survey respondents, for example, believe that employees had access to information they should not be able to access, while 40% of CIOs encountered employees who could not access data that they should be able to access.


"We do find lots of duplicate repositories," Lahiri says. "Take f ..

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