One in Four Companies Will Reduce Data Leakage Incidents by 2018, Gartner predicts

Some 25 percent of organizations will review privileged activity and reduce data leakage incidents by a third, as companies and auditors continue to focus on establishing controls for privileged access over the next two years, advisory company Gartner predicts.

“Only less than 5 percent of organisations were tracking and reviewing privileged activity in 2015,” said Felix Gaehtgens, research director at Gartner. “The remainder is, at best, controlling access and logging when, where and by whom privileged access takes place – but not what is actually done. Unless organisations track and review privileged activity, they risk being blindsided by insider threats, malicious users or errors that cause significant outages.”

“IT organisations are under increasing business and regulatory pressure to control access to these accounts, which can be administrative accounts, system accounts or operations accounts,” he said.

Last year, Gartner predicted worldwide information security spending would grow 4.7% to $75.4 billion in 2015. According to a RAND Corporation study, the cost of managing cyber-security is expected to increase 38% over the next 10 years, to almost $100 billion, as companies spend more on cyber-security tools.

Gartner recommends IT operations and security leaders use some best-practice approaches for effective and risk-aware privileged access management:

• inventory all accounts with privileged access and assign ownership
• shared-account passwords must not be shared
• minimize the number of personal and shared privileged accounts
• establish processes and controls for managing the use of shared accounts
• use privilege elevation for users with regular (non-privileged) access