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SMEs not dealing with IT security threats

Published On 9 March 2007 at 10:18:13

The majority of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) think that an IT security breach, such as a virus, would be severely detrimental to their business, according to new research.

In research carried out by research firm IDC and commissioned by MessageLabs and McAfee, it was discovered that IT decision makers in 80 per cent of SMEs feared threats such as email viruses.

However, these IT professionals felt that they were so involved with the day-to-day management of the systems that they were unable to take a proactive approach to security threats.

In general SMEs are more interested in keeping their enterprise running than planning for future security threats. Over a third (39 per cent) said that keeping up-to-date with security solutions was their biggest IT security priority, while 33 per cent said ensuring their IT costs were kept down was their goal.

"SME behaviour towards security is very tactical and meets their immediate requirements," explained Eric Domage, a European research manager at IDC.

"However, the next generation of threats are not understood, not analyzed and the complexity cannot be handled internally. Remotely managed security solutions will help SMEs fill the gap between their understanding of the threat and the real dangers."

Recently, a separate report found that 33 per cent of SMEs had no systems in place to recover if there website should crash or be damaged by a virus.

 

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