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A brave new Europe?
There is a growing realisation among organisations, be they large or small, that they need to focus on 'what they do best' but also explore new initiatives. More than ever, this dichotomy involves both productivity and revenue optimization yet can be somewhat unsettling. For instance, how do you leverage the relationships you have invested considerable resources in without ‘opening’ the door to unwanted guests? With the drive for new areas of growth, it is apparent that organisations need to protect themselves from potential financial and productivity losses, not to mention the downtime, caused by challenges with extending the enterprise. According to a recent European survey conducted by IDC, respondents were asked to state the challenge associated with a wide variety of potential IT issues and then subsequently rank these on a scale from 1-5, with 1 representing no significance and 5 for very high significance. Security was stated as the top challenge moving forward, with three quarters of respondents ranking it as significant or higher while a full 38% of respondents considering it as the highest significance (value 5). While the rush of the late nineties might have been to connect fast, the reality of today seems to be to connect securely. This heightened importance is reflected across major economies of Europe, as shown in Figure 1.
How significant is Security in terms of IT challenge?
Security adoption however remains fear-driven in Western Europe
thus far, with 45% of respondents quoting the risk of a major
security breach as highly significant (rating 5 out of 5) while
security audit results (identifying security gaps) shows considerable
consideration in 23% of European organisations.
Excluding physical security to the business premises, how significant would you say the
following factors are in influencing your security infrastructure?
Historically, investment in security has been very reactive. This can
be attributed to a lack of awareness, as well as a lack of data
and models to assist in justifying business cases and planned
investment in security. Many investments in IT security are still in
response to unauthorized access or malicious activity occurring,
but there is evidence that security is increasingly being viewed as
more strategic by select corporations, especially those that pursue
an integrated Web-enabled strategy.
As organisations recognise the security threat is more than just a
virus or breach issue, we are seeing an increased appreciation of
the breadth of the security challenge. Figure 2 shows another clear
trend correlated to the types of challenges organisations face; that
is, the distinction between threat-led and strategic-led security
spending. For instance, risk drivers, being the most prevalent today,
are reactionary and more operational in nature due to either an
internal review of existing systems or external market forces.
Enabling drivers, on the other hand, are more aligned with
forward-thinking objectives and thus could be considered more
strategic investment than spending. Still, the way forward may not
always be clear. Combined with the diversity of the individual
technologies that are used to address these security challenges,
organisations are facing an environment growing in complexity.Read the next chapter | | | more |  |
05/2004, IDC / Steria
An IDC White Paper commissioned by Steria.
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