SECURITY POLICY: What Keeps You Up At Night

Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM

           

According to a new report by Forrester Consulting, Cambridge, Mass., and commissioned by RSA Security, Bedford, Mass., creating — and enforcing — an enterprise data security policy is one issue that causes anxiety among chief security officers. The survey, conducted in April 2007 and titled “The State of Data Security in North America,” reports that 62 percent of respondents consider the enforcement of existing company data protection policies to be their most pressing issue. The report surveyed almost 200 organizations. Twenty percent of respondents were from companies with between 5,000 and 20,000 employees; 21 percent were from organizations with more than 20,000 employees; 29 percent were from organizations with revenues of between $1 billion and $10 billion; and 17 percent were from organizations with revenues greater than $10 billion. All of the respondents used encryption in their companies, and all respondents were involved with their companies' encryption policies. About half of the respondents held titles of chief security officer, officer or chief information security, chief information officer, IT director or vice president of IT.

Among its findings, the survey identifies rising costs and policy implementation hindrances as two roadblocks standing in the way of compliance with internal and regulatory policy mandates. Security policy issues have been around for years; according to the report, that might be part of the problem,. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they have data security policies that are either outdated or that require significant changes to bring them in line with regulatory and company mandates.

The study shows that some companies are satisfied with their policies, but they have not yet determined a way to confirm the policies are followed. According to the report, 27 percent say their policies are “rarely enforced.” Fifty-two percent of respondents listed data classification — knowing what data is important and everywhere it is located — as a top priority. Thirty-seven percent of respondents said they do not have a data classification policy. Sixty-two percent of respondents said they intend to increase their encryption deployments, and 65 percent plan to increase their overall spending on encryption. In addition, 52 percent of respondents intend to increase spending on data leak prevention technology.

“Organizations are grappling with the ‘data security dilemma’: how to respond to specific regulatory mandates and pressing issues while laying out a holistic and sustainable strategy for data loss,” says Dennis Hoffman, vice president and general manager, Data Security Group, and chief strategy officer at RSA. “The survey demonstrates that securing data has become an information management process that cannot be addressed effectively through unrelated projects and products: that all data must first be identified and classified; that different controls will need to be applied to prevent the data's loss; and that the enterprise-wide management of those controls needs to be as efficient as possible.”

Visit https://rsa-email.rsa.com/servlet/campaignrespondent?_ID_=rsa.4696&WPID=8671 to view the complete survey.

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