What Do You Think About Your Company’s Leaks? A Survey on End-Users Perception Toward Data Leakage Mechanisms

Data leakage can lead to severe issues for a company, including financial loss, damage of goodwill, reputation, lawsuits and loss of future sales. To prevent these problems, a company can use other mechanisms on top of traditional Access Control. These mechanisms include for instance Data Leak Prevention or Information Rights Management and can be referred as Transmission Control. However, such solutions can lack usability and can be intrusive for end-users employees. To have a better understanding of the perception and usage of such mechanisms within business infrastructures, we have conducted in this article an online survey on 150 employees. These employees come from different companies of different sizes and sectors of activity. The results show that whatever the size of the company or its sector of activity, security mechanisms such as access control and transmission control can be considered as quite intrusive and blocking for employees. Moreover, our survey also shows interesting results regarding more acceptable and user-friendly anti-data leakage mechanisms that could be used within companies.