According to a recent survey from Microsoft of 3,600 security, privacy and marketing professionals in the United States, the UK and Germany, 78 percent of respondents believe their marketing department informs security and privacy executives of what it's up to with personal data collection, yet only 30 percent of marketers said that that is in fact what they do.

That's only one finding that exemplifies how lack of collaboration is hurting companies when it comes to figuring out how to protect data. The survey was released on Oct. 23, the same day that the company released its most recent Security Intelligence Report, an analysis of the current threat landscape.