Security
The importance of security
SMEs are increasingly reliant on computers and the Internet for day-to-day business activity. They also have limited resources (personnel, time, etc) available. Today there is an every growing range of threats facing businesses from hackers, spyware, and disgruntled staff to criminal gangs. In addition technologies like PDA's, memory sticks, wireless networks etc open up new avenues for malicious activities. Organisations have valuable data which he needs to secure from unauthorised users. MailSure is the leading security solutions provider for the SME (small medium enterprise) market.
Survey Results
A survey of 2,800 IT managers has highlighted that result that most are planning further increases in security budgets for next year. Around 70 per cent of those questioned are planning to increase security spending in 2008.
A quarter of these plan to spend between seven and 10 per cent of their total budget on security, and 13 per cent plan to spend more than 15 per cent.
The survey reported that the main issue over the next few years was to prevent unauthorised network access and ability to find vulnerabilities in systems.
The biggest concerns highlighted were vulnerability assessment, leakage of confidential data and protecting web applications from worms or hacker attacks via SQL/command injection. The survey data indicated that UK companies are lagging behind their counterparts in the US, where security is predicted to take up 20 per cent of budgets.
UK Lagging behind
It also confirmed other recent research showing that UK businesses are not taking some security areas, particularly wireless security, seriously.