Only 17 Percent of Businesses Are Fully Prepared for Online Security Incidents: Survey

A new report is shedding light on how unprepared many businesses are towards online security threats.

The new cyber incident response report, carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit and sponsored by security firm Arbor Networks, includes the results of a survey of 360 senior business leaders in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific.

Based on responses, only 17 percent of businesses are fully prepared for an online security incident and over a third of firms (38 percent) have no incident response plan in place.

Meanwhile, the likelihood of encountering a security incident is high, with 77 percent of companies surveyed suffering at least one incident in the past two years.

“In the wake of recent high profile targeted attacks in the retail sector, a company’s ability to quickly identify and classify and incident, and execute a response plan, is critical to not only protecting corporate assets and customer data, but the brand, reputation and bottom line of the company,” Arbor Networks president Matthew Moynahan said in a statement.

However, the study focuses not only on highly public security incidents like the attack on Target before the holidays last year, or the outages plaguing the Royal Bank of Scotland in 2012, but also on smaller attacks that may pass by unnoticed.

Understandably, falling prey to online attacks remains somewhat of a taboo. When not legally required to report them, 57 percent of organisations choose not to voluntarily disclose security incidents. And only a third of companies share information about incidents with other organizations to spread best practice and benchmark their own response.

But there seems to be increasing internal pressure to deal with attacks. The report anticipates that more than 80 percent of organization will have an incident response team and plan in place in the next few years.

“There is an encouraging trend towards formalizing corporate incident response preparations,” EIU senior editor James Chambers said in a statement. “But with the source and impact of threats becoming harder to predict, executives should make sure that incident response becomes an organizational reflex rather than just a plan pulled down off the shelf.”

According to the report, the response plans of attack-ready firms are typically led by the IT department, but also draw upon external resources such as IT forensic experts, specialist legal advisers and law enforcement experts.

Companies would be wise to increase their security responsiveness not only to protect their data, but also their reputation, given that the handling of these incidents often have a way of becoming known to the public.

David Hamilton (14 Posts)

David Hamilton is a Toronto-based technology journalist who has written for the National Post and other news outlets. He has covered the hosting industry internationally for the Web Host Industry Review with particular attention to innovative hosting solutions and the issues facing the industry. David is a graduate of Queen’s University and the Humber College School of Media Studies.

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Security, Hybrid Cloud Present Lucrative Opportunities for Hosting Service Providers: Microsoft Study

Hosting providers are often told that security is one of the biggest barriers to customers adopting cloud. Following that logic, it should come as no surprise that security could be the most lucrative cloud opportunity for web hosts over the next few years, a new report by Microsoft suggests.

According to Hosting and Cloud Go Mainstream: 2014, a study released on Wednesday and conducted by 451 Research, 7.1 percent of organizations still believe that security concerns and issues are their single biggest challenge over the next two years.

“While cloud environments are significantly changing the way businesses operate today, one thing that hasn’t changed is the importance of security. As a result, security has emerged as the primary, and potentially most lucrative, cloud opportunity for hosters,” Michelle Bailey, senior vice president, Digital Infrastructure and Data Strategy, 451 Research. “Hosting is now the de facto solution for ‘trusted cloud’ implementations, and customers are willing to pay a premium for assurances. Our research shows that 60 percent of customers would pay their hosting service provider a 26 percent premium on average for security guarantees – and an additional 25 percent are already paying for such services.”

Aside from cloud security, the report looks into the phases and types of cloud deployment at more than 2,000 organizations around the world, in a variety of fields including manufacturing, finance and banking, science and tech, healthcare, government and education.

According to the report, on-premises private cloud adoption accounted for 26 percent of on-premises infrastructure spending last year. Hosted private cloud will account for 32 percent of hosted spending in the next 24 months.

In terms of hybrid cloud implementation, 51 percent of organizations surveyed said they had configured a hybrid cloud deployment. Combining an on-premise private cloud with a hosted private cloud was the most popular hybrid cloud configuration, with 60 percent of hybrid users having deployed this type.

Microsoft noted the trend towards hybrid cloud adoption in a study last year, called The New Era of Hosted Services. In an interview with the WHIR, Limena said Microsoft was in a position to capitilize on this trend given its vast partnership channel. Over the past two years, Microsoft has added around 9,500 hosting service providers.

Recently, Microsoft launched ExpressRoute, a new service that offers private connections between customer data centers and Windows Azure, enabling them to use the Azure public cloud as an extension of their private deployments.

Enterprise hybrid cloud adoption will help drive the market, which is expected to reach $79.54 billion by 2018, according to a MarketsandMarkets study.

The study finds that 45 percent of organizations are moving past the pilot phase of their cloud computing deployments, and more than 30 percent now have a formal cloud computing strategy in place.

Nicole Henderson (12 Posts)

Nicole Henderson is the Editor in Chief of the Web Host Industry Review where she covers daily news and features online, as well as in print. She has a bachelor of journalism from Ryerson University in Toronto. You can find her on Twitter @NicoleHenderson.

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