Despite interest in the industry, security consultants believe the industry is not yet afraid enough. Many companies remain sceptical, with the attitude "it won`t happen to me", say vendors.
"Security is still largely a grudge buy," explains Nadine Barnard, security and storage business unit manager at Comztek. "We need to shift this grudge buy to a value purchase."
However, locally there is still strong resistance.
Local IT security professionals maintain that South African companies must stop looking at what the ROI is on a security buy and look instead at what the company`s potential financial losses will be if data is lost or compromised (see the article on page 20).
It`s been said that perhaps all that needs to happen is for a large local organisation to be hit by a serious malware attack, because the proximity of the danger might cause other companies to relook their security systems.
Besides the ongoing security threats to companies` IT systems, new trends and issues are forcing companies to pay more attention to certain areas.
The looming new Bill on privacy will add a further burden to business in terms of cost, complexity and compliance (see page 62).
The massive growth in the number of mobile devices in use by employees has made mobile and wireless security of sudden, critical importance (see page 54 and 58).
And, as has been the case for several years, staff are the weakest link in companies` security (see page 38).
Malware is also proliferating (see page 42). However, there are better and better ways to protect company IP. Encryption is one (see page 27 and 52) and penetration testing is another (page 60). Biometrics is also coming into its own as an authentication tool to protect corporate IP (see page 50), and if things go wrong, the growing field of digital forensics can help track down perpetrators and bring them to book (page 48).
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