14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new study released on Tuesday by AlgoSec, 64% of professionals believe the greatest security risk is posed by insider threats. Around the same percentage (66%) say the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trend is also a major security concern.
The figures also show that 57% of the respondents are currently utilizing next-generation firewalls to protect their networks. This represents an increase of more than 41% compared to the previous year.
On the other hand, only less than 20% of organizations report having most of their security controls in the cloud. Interestingly, it appears the larger the company, the less likely it is that they have cloud-based security.
When it comes to managing network security devices, 60% of experts say their job is challenging because of the lack of visibility into security policies, and because of poor processes.
It turns out that application-related rule changes can be highly problematic, with 80% of respondents admitting that their organizations have suffered outages and security breaches because of them.
Out-of-process changes have also caused problems. 76% of the interviewed professionals blamed such changes for network and application outages.
“Increasing complexity in network security not only impacts an organization's ability to protect itself from cyber-threats, but also hampers business agility,” commented Nimmy Reichenberg, vice president of marketing and business development at AlgoSec.
“Based on the survey results, it's clear that organizations are faced with increasing insider threats as well as rising risk of network and application outages, but process improvement and better security policy enforcement that leverages automation can provide significant dividends.”
The “The State of Network Security 2013: Attitudes and Opinions” study, which is available in full here, is based on the responses of 179 security and network operations professionals that attended the RSA Conference in February.