The top 8 security threats of 2013
The past year has seen its share of newly emerging or persistent threats that security and IT executives need to be aware of and in many cases defend against.
The past year has seen its share of newly emerging or persistent threats that security and IT executives need to be aware of and in many cases defend against.
Outsourcing IT functions can be a smart business move, particularly if your organisation lacks specific expertise. IT infrastructure, networking, application development, help desk -- plenty of high-quality service providers are available to fulfill your IT needs.
But like other major business and technology initiatives, outsourcing comes with risks, regardless of how experienced the outsourcing provider is or how good the move looked initially.
Today's governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) software has useful features that can help organisations get a better handle on how they're managing risk, security and compliance issues.
As we've seen in recent years, natural disasters can lead to long-term downtime for organisations. Because earthquakes, hurricanes, snow storms or other events can put data centers and other corporate facilities out of commission for a while, it's vital that companies have in place a comprehensive disaster recovery plan.
In IT, failure is not an option. Not surprisingly, organisations have made it a high priority to develop and implement reliable business continuity plans to ensure that IT services are always available to internal users and outside customers.
As organisations increase their reliance on cloud-based services, collaboration tools and enabling users to access networks, the number of security breaches is on the rise. A new study by Forrester Research shows that more than half of the 306 companies surveyed (54 percent) reported a data breach in the previous year.
Even with the growing security threats, most enterprises continue to rely on the traditional username and password sign-on to verify a user's identity, rather than strong authentication, according to the study.
Is your company's data under surveillance by foreign spybots looking for any competitive advantages or weaknesses they can exploit? This might sound farfetched, but such electronic espionage is real. It's an insidious security threat that's a lot more common than you probably realise.
As an IT or security executive, determining whether your organisation is under attack via this seemingly undetectable threat - and putting in place adequate technology and procedural safeguards - should be a high priority. The stakes are too high to ignore the problem.
To protect networks and information against increasingly sophisticated threats, many organizations are deploying security in layers. Some are finding that an efficient way to do this is by using unified threat management (UTM) appliances.
Messaging software has become so critical that it's hard to imagine businesses functioning without it. Online collaboration products have also become vital. The question is, should you buy a messaging/collaboration suite from one vendor or purchase individual products for e-mail and collaboration from several?