Businesses in Singapore are losing critical data such as reports, personal data and customer details, because office workers are too scared or too embarrassed to report data loss or ransomware issues when using cloud applications, such as Microsoft Office 365, according to Veritas Technologies.
The Veritas survey polled 11,500 knowledge workers across nine countries.
Results show that few understand the risks and responsibilities required to protect the data they have in these cloud services, with 92% of respondents thinking that their cloud service providers are responsible for protecting data from accidental deletion or from ransomware. This false confidence continues to put vast amounts of data at risk.
In Singapore, the findings say that data loss has a big impact on employee wellbeing, as 49% of those surveyed tried to recreate deleted documents from memory, a time-consuming endeavor that potentially leads to more stress.
Others cite strong emotional reactions spanning from swearing (18%), lashing out and broken something (13%) and crying (14%).
Also, despite receiving prior training or guidance on where to save important files, employees are still losing critical business information. Among them, 81% have received specific training on where to save business files, but 46% continue to save their documents on their own desktop/computer.
Close to three-fifths (57%) of office workers have accidentally deleted data from cloud apps such as Office 365.
Almost half of office workers (44%) think data in the cloud is safer from ransomware in comparison to data stored on a computer/server in their own office because they assume their cloud providers are protecting it from malware.
Further, a culture of shame is preventing workers from owning up when they have caused data to be lost from cloud applications.
More than a quarter (26%) of respondents are ashamed, 28% did not know who to tell, and a further 24% did not think it was important to tell anyone.
It also appears that there is a belief that the collaborative nature of cloud applications means that other people might be suspected of having deleted the files instead.
