Information and Data Security

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Meet the Experts

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Frank Dickson

Group Vice President, Security & Trust

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Jennifer Glenn

Research Director



IDC's Information and Data Security recognizes the value that data brings to the enterprise and the criticality of protecting it without introducing delays or blocking essential operations. With data theft impacting over 1 billion people and businesses, IDC identifies and quantifies solutions that can protect data against an evolving host of threats. Topic areas include using content as the control point for information protection, security, privacy, and compliance with technologies such as discovery and classification, data loss prevention, messaging security, and data access governance. Other topics include the evolution of cryptography as we move toward cloud computing, Big Data and analytics, and the collection of massive amounts of machine and user-created content, which is increasingly turning many enterprises into data brokers. This service also includes coverage of masking and tokenization techniques as enterprise data stores grow with the promise of analytics and the use of data to enable behavioral security solutions, cognitive analytics, and monitoring and supervision.


Markets and Subjects Analyzed


  • Modern data security and privacy trends (ransomware and AI)
  • Cryptography and digital trust (file and whole disk encryption, key management, certificates, and tokenization)
  • Database/storage security (activity monitoring and obfuscation)
  • Information protection solutions (messaging security, data loss prevention, data discovery and classification, DSPM, and data access governance)

Core Research


  • Data Security Taxonomy
  • Worldwide Digital Trust Market Shares
  • Worldwide Digital Trust Market Forecast
  • Insider Threat Market Glance
  • IDC FutureScape
  • Information Protection Market Shares
  • Information Protection Market Forecast
  • Vendor Profile, Analysis, and Case Studies

In addition to the insight provided in this service, IDC may conduct research on specific topics or emerging market segments via research offerings that require additional IDC funding and client investment.


Key Questions Answered


  1. How can organizations better protect their sensitive data assets by understanding the motivations of attackers and/or malicious insiders?
  2. What steps can be taken to predict/combat emerging threats and improve data security?
  3. What innovative data security products and approaches may have long-term efficacy?
  4. How do continued cloud adoption, the growing nature of distributed corporate environments, and Big Data and analytics impact existing data security markets?
  5. How do organizations address data security that could potentially expose sensitive data elements and cause data decentralization?

Companies Covered