Dive Brief:

• A new survey from Vormetric found 90% of IT security pros in financial services feel vulnerable to a data breach, and 44% have already experienced one.

• Nearly one in five respondents indicated they had suffered a data breach in the last year.

• The report also found that 91% of respondents are using sensitive data in the cloud, though most have "high levels of concern" with cloud usage.

Dive Insight:

The Financial Services Edition of the 2016 Vormetric Data Threat Report, issued in conjunction with 451 Research, included responses from 1,100 senior IT security executives at large enterprises worldwide, including over 100 in U.S. financial services organizations.

"Financial services organizations continue to feel the heat from cyberattackers," said Tina Stewart, vice president of marketing for Vormetric. "They are investing to help solve the problem, but surprisingly, are failing to connect the dots about the best solutions to use. With the world’s financial data in their custody, the most effective way to protect this information, once networks and systems are penetrated, is to enhance data protection investments."

The report found that spending to protect data is increasing fastest in areas such as network defenses and end point and mobile device defenses that have been shown to be ineffective at protecting against multi-stage attacks.

The biggest barriers to adoption of better data security in the financial services industry included complexity and lack of staff.

The report also found that although cloud usage is high (91% are using sensitive data within cloud environments), there are also concerns over cloud security. The main concerns included security breaches at the cloud provider level (75%), increased vulnerabilities from shared infrastructure (72%) and lack of a data privacy policy or privacy service level agreements (71%).