Research carried out on-site at the recent Infosecurity 2011 conference in London, surveying attending security professionals, suggests that organisations are struggling to meet current security demands.
Some 55 percent of attending security professionals do not think their application security is optimised and aligned to meet current enterprise demands.
Furthermore, 59 percent of respondents believe the time it takes for them to secure and maintain their existing applications negatively impacts their ability to deliver quick, new services. Thirty-four percent of attending security professionals indicated a lack of budget as the biggest obstacle in securing their IT infrastructure, with 30 percent citing a lack of time and 16 percent inadequate IT skills.
To be an Instant-On Enterprise, IT must develop integrated security approaches that protect business assets while making them available to authorised users. However, the on-site Infosecurity research conducted on behalf of HP indicates that an overwhelming 84 percent of security professionals believe there to be software vulnerabilities present in their current IT infrastructure, with a further 48 percent testing their applications only occasionally or not at all.
Other key findings include:
— 35 percent of security professionals do not have the ability to find, fix and prevent security vulnerabilities before they can be exploited by attackers
— Although 52 percent are either confident or very confident that their business critical information is secure in their current IT infrastructure, 43 percent have experienced an attack on their IT infrastructure in the past 12 months, and 81 percent believe the frequency of attacks is likely to increase over the next 12 months
— 61 percent of security professionals believe there to be more than 20 percent of unsecure applications within their IT infrastructure.
