SSL-Capable Applications Consistent Among Regions

Last week we reviewed subtle differences in application usage among enterprises in different regions, based on the data in our 2014 Application Usage and Threat Report. A number of you have asked if we noticed any regional patterns pertaining to the applications appearing on networks that are capable of using SSL encryption.

Here is the breakdown by region of what we found:

The 2014 AUTR summarizes network traffic assessments performed worldwide in more than 5,500 enterprise organizations in the span of a year. Regionally, there was little variance in the number of applications found on these networks that are capable of using SSL encryption:

• Globally, 34 percent of the thousands of applications observed are capable of using SSL
• In Asia Pacific about 32 percent of applications observed are capable of using SSL
• Japan had the highest percentage of SSL usage (36 percent of applications observed) based on applications found
• In Europe, about 30 percent of applications observed are capable of using SSL
• In the Americas and Canada, 32 percent of applications observed are capable of using SSL

The big takeaway regarding SSL from the 2014 AUTR isn't these regional differences, it's that many administrators throughout the world still don't have a handle on which applications running on their networks are capable of using SSL. As we've seen with Heartbleed, that knowledge gap can be dangerous -- how many applications running on the network use unpatched versions of OpenSSL, for example?

For more

• Download the 2014 Application Usage and Threat Report
• Interactively browse the data using our AUTR visualization tool
• Watch a video discussing key findings from the AUTR
• Have a look at some of the subtle regional differences among application usage and threats in the enterprise
• Read Scott Simkin's recent SecurityWeek column on why SSL decryption is so important to security administrators