2022 Global Encryption Trends Study

We surveyed 6,264 individuals across multiple industry sectors in 17 countries/regions – Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Mexico, the Middle East (which is a combination of respondents located in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates), Netherlands, the Russian Federation, Spain, Southeast Asia, South Korea, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

The purpose of this research is to examine how the use of encryption has evolved over the past 17 years and the impact of this technology on the security posture of organizations. The first encryption trends study was conducted in 2005 for a U.S. sample of respondents. Since then, we have expanded the scope of the research to include respondents in all regions of the world.

Organizations with an overall encryption strategy increased significantly since last year. Since 2018, the deployment of an overall encryption has steadily increased. This year, 62 percent of respondents say their organizations have an overall encryption plan that is applied consistently across the entire enterprise, a significant increase from last year. Only 22 percent of respondents say they have a limited encryption plan or strategy that is applied to certain applications and data types, a significant decrease from last year. The average annual global budget for IT security is $24 million per organization. The countries with the highest average annual budgets are the U.S. ($41 million) and Germany ($28 million).