Enterprises concerned about Web 2.0 threats, says Secure Computing study
ConvergenceAsia staff
05/10/2007

Secure Computing, an enterprise gateway security company, has announced the results of a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Secure Computing.

The study, which surveyed 153 IT professionals and security decision makers in companies with at least 1,000 employees, found that while Web 2.0 usage is already prevalent in enterprises, organisations are not prepared to deal with the potential threats associated with the technology. The study further notes a lack of risk awareness, user training and consistent policies.

The study suggests that about half of the organisations surveyed spent more than 25 thousand dollars in the last fiscal year on malware remediation. It was therefore not surprising to learn that businesses are wary of Web 2.0 usage and associated threats.

While 97 per cent of all enterprise IT staff considers themselves “prepared,” 79 per cent have reported frequent attacks from malware. In addition, 79 per cent of those surveyed are concerned about viruses, and 77 per cent about Trojans, but only 12 per cent were concerned about botnets even though bot networks have been growing rapidly as demonstrated by the recent estimate that the storm threat was propagated by over 1 million computers in a single botnet. These findings confirm that the majority of today’s enterprises are still concerned to a considerable degree about Web 2.0 threats in their organisations.

Other significant findings include:

- It costs organisations from US$15–30 per user per year to recover from malware threats alone.

- Ninety two per cent of the respondents indicate that outbound data leakage prevention is an important aspect of Web filtering and 58 per cent consider data leakage an extremely important business concern.

- Only 33 per cent of the respondents have data leakage prevention capabilities in place today.

The study found a noticeable discrepancy between the amount of concern over security threats, and how well prepared businesses actually are — or even perceive themselves to be.

While nearly 97 per cent of those surveyed consider themselves prepared for Web-borne threats, a full 68 per cent concede that there is room for improvement. However, it is important to note that when asked how often they experience malware attacks, a 79 per cent reported more than infrequent occurrences of malware, with viruses and spyware being the leading issues.

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