Companies are putting their customers’ data at risk because IT teams do not have the expertise or time to deploy overly complicated IT security products, a new survey has revealed.
The survey, which was carried out at RSA Conference 2015 and measured the attitudes of nearly 170 IT security professionals, revealed the following:
- 69% of respondents did not feel they are using their IT security products to their full potential.
- 71% of IT professionals believe this is putting their company, and possibly customers, at risk.
- 61% admitted that their organization has deployed a security product purely to meet regulatory compliance.
- 62% found the products too complicated to deploy, too time to consume to deploy, or didn’t think they had the expertise to properly deploy them.
Our CTO, Mark Kedgley comments: "One of the biggest concerns associated with any form of sophisticated security monitoring such as File Integrity Monitoring (FIM) is making sense of the inevitable increase in information and alerts that will naturally be generated. However, it is simply inexcusable to ignore the problem and put both your company and customers data at risk.
"From Target to Home Depot the fall out of a major breach is horrendous. The negative publicity is even worse when monitoring tools were in place, had identified a suspicious system change or two and were sending out alerts to raise the alarm. The fact that alerts simply got lost in the noise is unjustifiable. In the case of Target, what made the breach so damaging was that alerts were being missed.
"While compliance is typically the biggest driver for a security product purchase, the ideal solution will provide a continuous compliance approach. This means change control, vulnerability management, and system integrity monitoring need to be combined to give non-stop protection against the vast spectrum of threats.
"The challenge for organizations is to attain that balance between unworkable change control practices and an anarchic environment that provides ample opportunities to hide. Closing the loop on change control delivers that vital visibility of all integrity changes but with just a fraction of the noise generated by traditional FIM implementation, enabling organizations to have far more confidence both in the validity of alarms and their ability to investigate and disarm."
You can read the full findings on Information Security Buzz here