A study has suggested that organisations surveyed in the UK are becoming increasingly concerned about the threat of intellectual property theft and confidential information being used to access business-critical systems. Some 61 per cent of UK respondents believe securing web traffic poses a significant threat to network security. Respondents are also seeing the greatest rise to network security in a lack of system visibility, malicious insider risks, and cloud infrastructure.
The Ponemon Institute report
The report, which surveyed 4,774 global IT and IT security professionals across nine countries including over 520 in the UK, identified the challenges enterprises are facing around emerging IT security threats and their ability to defend against them. The research found that the growing sophistication of cyber attacks, the changing threat landscape, and fear of theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, are spurring investment in network security.
Many UK IT respondents are concerned that their organisations are ill-equipped to detect, pacify, and prevent attacks quickly, with many respondents rating their organisation’s current approach to protecting the network from such attacks as ‘not very effective’. A majority of UK respondents (65 per cent) also confirmed that they believe the newly-proposed EU privacy laws will have a significant impact on overall business operations saying that the biggest impact is likely to be caused by a company having to alert a senior regulation authority within 24 hours if they have had a data breach, as many companies said they have suffered two successful data breaches in the last 12 months.
Infosecurity practitioners in the UK responded that top network security priorities include increasing visibility of web traffic, raising awareness about emerging threats and expediting the move from on-premise to cloud IT.
Securing web traffic
· 61 per cent of IT security respondents in the UK said that securing web traffic is their most significant network security concern. The majority of UK respondents also highlighted the need to heighten the visibility of applications and the use of cloud services to prevent security attacks.
Inside-out threat
· 61 per cent of UK IT respondents said their organisation uses network protection to minimise the inside-out threat (threats originating within the network)
EU privacy laws
· 65 per cent of UK respondents said the newly-proposed EU privacy laws will have a significant impact on their overall business operations and compliance activities.
What they say
Larry Ponemon, founder, the Ponemon Institute, said: “Organisations understand the need to take a proactive approach to network security to mitigate the impact of a security breach or incident. The report highlights that IT security professionals need support to protect organisations from cyber-attacks, both inside-out and outside-in, and that an holistic approach to network security is needed to ensure the integrity of intellectual property and industrial processes, and protect organisations from attack.”
Sean Dolan, senior vice president (EMEA), Juniper Networks, said: “Next-generation security for the enterprise must be built on automated and actionable intelligence that can be quickly shared to meet the demands of modern and evolving networks. The focus must be holistic but look to deal with the increasingly sophisticated cyber attacks. This is only possible if you are able to collect definitive information about attackers. Juniper’s Junos Spotlight Secure provides the platform to deliver advanced intelligence with device-level attacker tracking. This integrated approach improves security intelligence, provides collective defense against attackers and delivers true defense in-depth for the data centre, addressing the concerns raised by many respondents in the Ponemon research.”
Visit http://www.juniper.net.
Also to view:
· Ponemon Study: Emerging Technology Under the Spotlight Blog by Johnnie Konstantas
· Ponemon Study Report Download: Efficacy of Emerging Network Security Technologies
· Deconstructing Web Attack Trends in 2012 Blog by Kyle Adams
Spotlight Secure Global Attacker Intelligence Service: First System for Fingerprinting Cyber Attackers Blog by David Koretz
