Are Your Employees Threatening Your Network Security?
Despite firewalls and email protection, poor online habits compromise the network security of small- to medium-sized enterprises.
Even though the large majority of SMEs have anti-virus and anti-spam software and firewalls to guard against infiltration, 42% percent of surveyed U.S businesses feel insecure, according to software developer GFI.
Top Daily IT Concerns for SMEs
- Security issues
- Downtime
- User support
- Network growth
- Compliance
- eDiscovery
Source: GFI, 2007
Email viruses, unknowingly unleashed by corporate users, pose the greatest threat to 39% of the surveyed SMEs, followed by internet downloads (22%), hacker attempts (10%), and malware installations (9%). Uncontrolled portable devices, such as MP3 players, USB sticks, and digital cameras, were troublesome to 7% of the respondents.
But Andre Muscat, GFI’s director of engineering warns that uncontrolled portable devices have potential to wreak more havoc on networks. “While companies are aware of, and are focused on, tackling viruses and malware, they appear to be giving sparse attention to other equally dangerous threats such us data theft and leakage from endpoints such as connected USB sticks, iPods, and PDAs on the network.”
While just 32% of SMEs suffered a network security breach in the last 12 months, 78% of the respondents indicated their company network was not very secure or just somewhat secure.
Employees who have a greater awareness of security issues would improve the level of security in their companies, according to 48% of the surveyed SMEs; and 25% said that senior management needed to become more cognizant of the potential threats. Respondents were nearly evenly split on the whether or not it was difficult to convince management to invest in security solutions. As a result, more than three-quarters of the IT leaders who were surveyed said that their budgets were not large enough to properly cover their security requirements.
But good budgetary news is on the horizon for SMEs. A study by Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc. found U.S.-based SMEs will have spent about US$240 billion on improving their IT and telecom infrastructure and applications with 17% more spent on IT security in 2007 over 2006.
