The wired world has its pluses and minuses, and for most CEOs, that connection to the outside world and the Internet at large has a major negative. It’s not their employees goldbricking by messing with March Madness brackets or playing FarmVille on Facebook, it’s security threats. What percentage consider security as their top priority? eSecurity Planet will tell you.
The overwhelming majority of CEOs are resigned to the reality that their organizations will suffer a data breach of some type in the coming year, according to an IBM-sponsored study conducted by the Ponemon Institute, a fact that has many reevaluating their security priorities and budgets.
Ponemon Institute, a Traverse City, Mich. security research firm, queried 115 C-level executives at U.K.-based enterprises to get an idea of just how much the sustained barrage of cyber attacks and high-profile data breaches has changed their organizations’ security strategies.
All of the respondents said that their companies had their data attacked at least once in the past year and 77 percent said they had endured a data breach at some point. Seventy-six percent of the execs said that they now view reducing potential security flaws in their business-critical applications as the single most important aspect of their IT security plan.
“In the face of growing security threats, business leaders are finally recognizing that a strong data protection strategy plays a critical role to their bottom line,” Larry Ponemon, chairman and founder of The Ponemon Institute, said in a statement. “Once viewed as purely a technical issue, the responses garnered in our survey highlight a shift in how organizations are treating their investments in security software.”
