WASHINGTON ― U.S. federal government agencies experienced a 20 percent increase in the number of data breaches last year since 2016, according to Thales’ 2018 Data Threat Report.

Part of this increase is due to the growing use of commercial cloud services without the adoption of encryption or prioritization cloud computing security, the report said.

“The massive adoption of cloud computing does not correlate with implementations of data security tools suited to protect these new environments,” said Garrett Bekker, principal analyst for information security at 451 research, which helped contribute to the report.

Although 93 percent of federal agencies are preparing to spend more this year on cloud computing security than they have in the past, the majority of that money will be spent on endpoint security and network security, the report said.

Only 19 percent will allocate most of their funding on data-centric security solutions, such as encryption and tokenization.

Daniel Cebul is an editorial fellow and general assignments writer for Defense News, C4ISRNET, Fifth Domain and Federal Times.

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