Companies hide data from employees and are not dealing with information risk

Recommind, the leader in search-powered information risk management (IRM) software, has released survey results that showed: today corporate data is inaccessible to employees and risk-laden to enterprises. 

The survey showed that employees spend an average of 38 minutes searching for a single document, and cannot use technology to locate internal expertise, which specialist interpret being a competitive disadvantage against its peers. 

On the other hand, only 19% stated they felt their company’s data retention policies were “crucial to the business,” with 52% feeling they were only “somewhat important” or “a complete waste of time.” The fact that most enterprises aren’t more stringently enforcing, or even updating, data retention policies means enterprise data can severely damage an organization through litigation, regulatory sanction, internal theft or fraud. 

The survey was conducted among knowledge workers from enterprises averaging 10,000+ employees. They were asked to rate how prepared they felt their companies were to deal with various information-related threats to which only 42% answered they had an enterprise search solution in place and 73% had not invested in additional search or information-related technologies since the economic downturn had began (generally believed to be December, 2007). 

Some other interesting information found during the survey includes: 71% of employees trawl the corporate network / server in order to find documents, 60% send an email / IM requesting to have it sent and 35% simply call someone; and that 86% of employees expressed concerns about how prepared their organizations were to deal with information risk.