Survey: Security Pros Have ‘Critical’ Concerns About Infosec

PRESS RELEASE

Mountain View, Calif. and Chicago, Ill. – March 31, 2015 – Blue Lava, a strategic consulting group that helps Fortune 1,000 enterprises assess IT risks and develop internal Information Security (InfoSec) programs, today released findings from their “Third Annual Information Security Survey” of over 300 InfoSec leaders and practitioners. The survey revealed that despite the beginnings of positive change, there are still critical security industry practices that need to be addressed. This is particularly true as companies transform their data centers as they move to the cloud, coupled with major concerns like breaches and compliance that are top of mind for the majority of InfoSec professionals.

“Digital transformation means data center transformation and change is hard, especially when it comes to Information security,” said Demetrios “Laz” Lazarikos, two-time former CISO, former PCI QSA, and Founder of Blue Lava Consulting. “From the results of our survey, it is clear that data center security needs to be a greater priority across all levels of the company, especially at the top. And enterprises need to consider new agile security solutions, as the old fragile systems from traditional security vendors continue to fail.”

The Blue Lava study found:
· Already, 11 percent of respondents report directly to the Board of Directors;
· But nearly a third (29 percent) don’t believe there is enough Board oversight.
· A majority of respondents (85 percent) expect a rise in breaches as they move to the cloud;
· Two-thirds (76 percent) have seen a budget increase as a result;
· While nearly one-third (29 percent) are still driven by compliance; see article on how to adapt to the changing global enterprise security landscape.
· And only 49 percent have taken a proactive risk-based approach.
· More than 75 percent of the respondents said that they are aggressively evaluating new vendors with agile security solutions vs. considering traditional security vendors and approaches to protect their data centers.

vArmour, the leader in data center security and sponsor of the Blue Lava study, is seeing trends consistent with the results of the Blue Lava Survey.

“We’ve noticed the same issues in the industry, demonstrating that you can’t fight a new war with old weapons. Real progress in enterprise security is about having deep, immediate visibility and dynamic controls to protect critical assets and IP from advanced cyber-attacks and laterally moving threats,” said Tim Eades, vArmour CEO. “vArmour’s distributed security system is the new weapon, enabling enterprises to take a proactive approach to security to overcome these complex security challenges and truly realize the benefits of moving to the cloud.”

A Greater Need For Information Sharing
Recently, President Obama signed an Executive Order promoting information sharing and created the Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC) as way to coalesce all cyber threat information. Despite this push for information sharing by the government, the results of the Information Security Survey show that a significant gap still exists when it comes to cyber threat information sharing. Only 36 percent of survey respondents reported sharing information with industry groups and more than half (52 percent) do not share any information at all. It would pay to reconsider this approach knowing that cyber criminals usually share vulnerability information and exploit tools to stay ahead of businesses.

What Matters and Doesn’t In Security Today
Two significant concerns for InfoSec professionals are being unaware of a security breach or malware on their system, reported by 80 and 88 percent, respectively. In fact, research indicates that an average threat now lives inside an enterprise network for 229 days before detection*. Other major concerns gleaned by the survey include third party access to the organization’s environment (89 percent) as well as the biggest worry, application layer security (91 percent).

Not surprisingly, most InfoSec professionals are still somewhat or really concerned about BYOD (77 percent), executive knowledge of security (65 percent), meeting regulatory compliance (65 percent), patching vulnerabilities (69 percent) and Tor traffic (69 percent). This demonstrates that a majority of InfoSec professionals still find their current security stance lacking.

A key takeaway from the survey is that InfoSec professionals have lost confidence in legacy security solutions that concentrate on perimeter bound data centers, as they prove to be fragile time and again. With cyber-attacks and data breaches on the rise and becoming more malicious, the problem will only get worse unless the right actions are taken to secure an organization’s assets. As a result, the majority of the survey respondents are looking at new vendors that take a different approach to solving the problem.

To learn more about the Third Annual Information Security survey findings, sign up for the upcoming webinar by Demetrios “Laz” Lazarikos, founder of Blue Lava Consulting. The webinar will take place on April 9, 2015, at 10 a.m. PDT. You can register for the webinar on vArmour’s website.

Methodology
The Third Annual Information Security was facilitated by Blue Lava Consulting, polling 320 executives in IT Security and data security, which include CEO's, CISO's, IT Directors and Board members across Fortune 1,000 companies.

*Source: Gartner Group, Mandiant

About vArmour
Based in Mountain View, Calif., vArmour is the data center security company focused on securing the data-defined perimeter of enterprises. The company has raised $42 million in funding led by Allegis Capital, Citi Ventures, Columbus Nova Technology Partners, Highland Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures and Work-Bench Ventures. Executives from NetScreen, Juniper Networks, Silver Tail Systems, Citrix, Riverbed and IBM lead the company. Learn more at: www.varmour.com

vArmour Media Contact:
Bill Bode
Highwire PR for vArmour
(415) 963-4174 x49
[email protected]