Forty-three per cent of the 2,100 businesses surveyed by computer security firm Symantec all lost confidential or proprietary data during 2009, and that 75 per cent of the businesses polled experienced some type of cyber crime in the last 12 months. In order to quantify the cost, Symantec asked companies to look at a range of factors which negatively impacted them as a result of cyber crime – such as lost revenue, loss of customer relationships and damage to their firm’s brand. This came out at a mean average of £1.2 million per company.
Study Highlights include:
- Forty-two percent of enterprises rank cyber risk as their top concern, more than natural disasters, terrorism, and traditional crime combined.
- On average, IT assigns 120 staffers to security and IT compliance. Enterprises rated “better management of business risk of IT” as a top goal for 2010, and 84 percent rated it absolutely/somewhat important.
- Every enterprise experienced cyber losses in 2009. The top three reported losses were theft of intellectual property, theft of customer credit card information or other financial information, and theft of customer personally identifiable information. These losses translated to monetary costs 92 percent of the time. The top three costs were productivity, revenue, and loss of customer trust.
The report also hightlights that enterprise security is becoming more difficult due to a number of factors. First, enterprise security is understaffed, with the most impacted areas being network security, endpoint security, and messaging security. Second, enterprises are embarking on new initiatives that make providing security more difficult. Initiatives that IT rated as most problematic from a security standpoint include infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a service, server virtualization, endpoint virtualization, and software-as-a-service. Finally, IT compliance is also a huge undertaking. The typical enterprise is exploring 19 separate IT standards or frameworks and are currently employing eight of them. The top standards include ISO, HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, CIS, PCI, and ITIL.
