Cyber attacks and IP theft pose biggest threats

Juniper Networks has announced the U.K. findings of a Ponemon Institute report. Commissioned globally by Juniper Networks, the research highlighted that organisations surveyed in the U.K. are becoming increasingly concerned about the threat of intellectual property theft and confidential information being used to access business-critical systems. 61 per cent of U.K. respondents believe securing web traffic poses a significant threat to network security. Respondents are also seeing the greatest rise to network security in a lack of system visibility, malicious insider risks, and cloud infrastructure.

Wednesday, 24th April 2013 Posted 11 years ago in by Phil Alsop

The report, which surveyed 4,774 global IT and IT security professionals across nine countries including over 520 professionals in the U.K., identified the challenges enterprises are facing around emerging security threats and their ability to defend against them. The research found that the growing sophistication of cyber attacks, the changing threat landscape, and an increasing fear of theft of intellectual property and trade secrets, are spurring investment in network security technologies.

Many U.K. IT respondents are concerned that their organisations are ill-equipped to detect, pacify, and prevent attacks quickly, with many respondents rating their organisation’s current approach to protecting the network from such attacks as ‘not very effective’. The majority of U.K. respondents (65 per cent) also confirmed that they believe the newly-proposed EU privacy laws will have a significant impact on overall business operations saying that the biggest impact is likely to be caused by a company having to alert a senior regulation authority within 24 hours if they have had a data breach, as many companies said they have suffered two successful data breaches in the last 12 months.

Security practitioners in the U.K. responded that top network security priorities include increasing visibility of web traffic, raising awareness about emerging threats and expediting the move from on-premise to cloud environments.

The research highlighted multiple key concerns around network security that IT security professionals in the U.K. are facing on a daily basis:
Securing web traffic is the biggest network security concern for organisations in the U.K.

61 per cent of IT security respondents in the U.K. said that securing web traffic is their most significant network security concern. The majority of U.K. respondents also highlighted the need to heighten the visibility of applications and the use of cloud services in order to prevent security attacks
U.K. organisations focus on inside-out threat could expose businesses to greater outside-in threat

61 per cent of U.K. IT respondents said their organisation uses network protection to minimise the inside-out threat (threats originating within the network)

Concerns over EU privacy laws
65 per cent of U.K. respondents said the newly-proposed EU privacy laws will have a significant impact on their overall business operations and compliance activities.