[Techtaffy Newsdesk]

A new survey commissioned by Xerox and McAfee, reveals that more than half (54 percent) of employees say they don’t always follow their company’s IT security policies (33 percent) or aren’t even aware of the policies (21 percent) – leaving the security of customer credit card numbers, financial reports, and HR and tax documents at risk.

According to the survey, 39 percent of employees who copy, scan or print confidential information at work worry at least sometimes whether the information on a networked device will remain secure.

“With more than 50,000 new security threats emerging each day, protecting sensitive company information can be intimidating for IT managers – especially when you consider that any device sitting on the network, from a PC to a fax machine, can be exposed to those threats,” said Rick Dastin, president, Enterprise Business Group, Xerox Corporation.

Half (51 percent) of those employees whose workplace has a printer, copier or MFP say they’ve copied, scanned or printed confidential information at work.

Of the 39 percent who say they are at least sometimes worried about confidential information staying secure, 86 percent say they are at least somewhat worried about personal information, 77 percent say customer data, 77 percent say employee information and 70 percent say proprietary company information.

More than half (54 percent) say computers pose the biggest security threat to their company’s network compared to other IT devices, while only 6 percent say it is MFPs.

Only 13 percent of employees whose workplace has a printer, copier or MFP say they are prompted to enter a password or passcode on the MFP before releasing a job they’ve printed or accessing the ability to copy.

“The threat landscape has evolved to include devices that when originally designed, where never considered a security threat,” said Tom Moore, vice president of embedded sales, McAfee. “Now we are seeing the need for security on devices like MFPs to protect confidential and proprietary data, which if lost or stolen, could negatively impact a company and its employees.”

Survey Methodology

The survey was conducted online within the United States by Harris Interactive on behalf of Xerox from Jan. 5-9, 2012 among 2,541 adults ages 18 and older, of which 1,391 are employed full and/or part time. This survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated.

Upload: 02-22-12