Widespread disparity between perceptions of who owns corporate data may be to blame for many business data losses, as a new survey reveals how many workers plan to take data away from their companies once they have left their current employment.

As reported by IT Pro News, 70 per cent of respondents to a survey by Imperva said that they planned on taking some kind of data away from their current position when they left. With intellectual property cited most frequently by just over a quarter of respondents - and customer records following closely with 20 per cent - these losses will be far from trivial to the majority of business owners.
 

Lack of clarity over data security policies

"This survey refutes the conventional wisdom that insiders are corporate spies or revenge seeking employees," said Amichai Shulman, CTO of Imperva. "Most employees have no deliberate intention to cause the company any damage. Rather, this survey indicates that most individuals leaving their jobs believe that they had rightful ownership to that data just by virtue of their corporate tenure."

This perception could be due to a lack of clarity of data security policies. In Imperva's survey, over three quarters of respondents said their firms had no policy to remove company data from employee laptops upon departure - or at the very least, workers were unaware of one. These findings are in line with those of a Cisco report released earlier this month, which showed that though 82% of companies have IT policies, on average less than one in four employees (24%) feel they have been informed about them.

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