90 percent of US federal agencies feel vulnerable to data threats

According to the findings of the US Federal Government Edition of the 2016 Vormetric Data Threat Report from enterprise data protection company Vormetric and 451 Research, 61% of IT security leaders have experienced a past data breach, with nearly one in five indicating a breach in 2015.

The top barriers to adopting better security are named as skill shortages at 44%, and budgets at 43%. Despite news stories highlighting the threat of nation state hacking, the top external threat actors identified were cybercriminals at 76%, with nation state hackers coming a distant fourth at 47%.

Bright spots in the report include that 58% are increasing spending to offset threats to data, and 37% are increasing spending on data-at-rest defenses this year. The top categories for increased spending over the next 12 months are network defenses at 53%, followed by analysis and correlation tools at 46%.

According to 60% of respondents network defenses are effective at safeguarding data, more than any other vertical and well above the US average of 53%. With data-at-rest defenses seen as the most effective tools for protecting data once other defenses have failed, surprisingly these were ranked last in terms of US federal spending plans, with just 37% planning to increase their spending on data-at-rest defenses, compared to the US average of 45%.

However, many respondents are planning to implement newer security tools that are more effective at protecting data even when other defenses have been compromised. These include cloud security gateways (40%), application encryption (34%), data masking (31%) and tokenization (27%).