Vericept Corporation announced the results of an Enterprise Strategy Group research report that found that more than one-third of organizations not using a data loss prevention solution had information stolen from their databases within the last 12 months and that 30 percent of those data breaches impacted bottom-line revenues.

The research report, "The Case for Data Leakage Prevention", concluded that enterprises need to be proactive in taking preventive actions against the growing threat of data leakage. Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), a research analyst firm with a specialty in IT security, conducted the survey.

"Data breaches originating inside an organization continue to make headlines and wreak havoc on corporate reputation and revenue," said Jon Oltsik, Senior Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group and Author of the report. "The ESG research demonstrates that businesses are realizing how important it is to have a data leak prevention solution in place. Those organizations without a data loss prevention solution live with the ever-increasing risk of a financially devastating data breach."

The research report is based upon the responses of 206 security professionals at organizations with at least 1,000 employees in 21 different vertical industries. The key findings of the survey include:

- Seventy-Two percent of users said that government regulations/compliance provide the biggest motivator for protecting confidential data. Another 62% were driven by the internally-driven need to protect "intellectual property"

- Nearly one-third of organizations not deploying a data loss prevention solution have experienced a data breach within the last 12 months.

Another 10 percent said that they "don't know" if they have experienced a data breach in the past year:

- Of those organizations that experienced a data breach within the past 12 months, 30% indicated that their company's data breaches resulted in a "direct loss of revenue"

- Of those organizations that had deployed a data loss prevention solution, approximately one-fourth had implemented an integrated network and host based solution. Given all of the data leakage threat vectors, ESG expects that preference for an integrated solution will continue to grow

Respondents also believe a comprehensive and powerful classification engine is central to the effectiveness of a data leak prevention solution. The majority of respondents noted that more than 50 percent of their corporate data could be classified as confidential. Further, this data falls into various categories (IP, customer information, compliance, etc) and data types (email, databases, etc.).

Because of the breadth of possible categories, a solution with a classification feature has become one of the most important, but despite its value, past ESG research has found current data discovery and classification processes to be inadequate at a large percentage of enterprise organizations.