Employers beware: Hoarding of sensitive company data pervasive among Singapore IT staff

Almost 8 in 10 confessed of data hoarding.

Veritas research reveals that 79 percent of 1000 IT decision makers (ITDM) surveyed in Singapore admit to being digital hoarders which could pose serious financial, security and data management risks to organizations.

The survey further revealed that 82 percent of all respondents indicate that they store data that could be potentially harmful to theirorganizations.

These include: unencrypted personal records, job applications to other companies, unencrypted company secrets and embarrassing employee correspondence.

Here's more from Veritas:

The findings highlighted that digital hoarding ITDMs keep 52 percent of all the data they create.  They also concede that the oldest files on their computers are six years old, on average.

While this indicates that data hoarding behavior is common across organizations, many office professionals, 57 percent, admit that they wouldn’t trust a data hoarder to turn in a project on time, higher than the global average at 48 percent.

And nearly one in three (32 percent) digital hoarding office professionals have never followed through on a plan to delete old files.

Respondents are also willing to do the unexpected in order to keep the files they’ve hoarded, giving up their clothes and weekends rather than deleting their files.

Close to half (45 percent) would rather get rid of all their clothes than their digital files while 37 percent would rather work weekends for three months than get rid of all their digital files.