With many companies shutting down for the holidays, chances are that the IT team at your business are running - if anything - a skeleton staff and many are hoping to have a relaxing Christmas and New Year break.
The shift toward using personal computing devices (laptops, tablets, smartphones and now wearables) to conduct business seems like a win-win strategy for both the enterprise and its employees. Employees work from the comfort of their own device while employers enjoy increased productivity and reduced technology costs.
The latest “State of Information Security Survey” from consulting firm PcW sheds some new light on what organizations are doing to protect their data assets from hacker attacks and other incidents. And it helps to illustrate how cyber security has become a top-of-mind consideration for business leaders as they try to stay a step ahead of the bad actors.
With a turbulent 2015 and a 15-year-history of fighting malware as a guide, here is what 2016 may bring for the security industry, the online criminal underworld, and corporate and private consumers.
CIOs and CISOs face each day the fear of internal and external threats from criminal syndicates, employees, external contractors or hacktivists that could damage their company’s reputation. But what happens when a government agency wants to affect your business forecast and learn all your secrets? This concern is real and increasing -- state-sponsored attacks rank sixth among the most likely sources of attacks on a company, cited by 35% of the respondents in a recent survey, compared with 27% in 2014.
Shadow IT. Just the name runs little shivers up the spines of IT executives—they like to turn it up a notch sometimes and call it rogue IT. Many IT executives look at shadow IT as a disease. It’s scary and risky for end users to go out and get their own SaaS solutions without IT approval or knowledge. It’s even scarier and riskier when the DEV team goes out and spins up a bunch of Amazon instances to essentially stand up an entire shadow data center for some project or other.
