Mobility remains a top security concern for IT staff in the US, even as the borderless office continues to become a mainstream model—but confidence in addressing the threat is lacking.
As organizations are becoming increasingly distributed with more remote offices and mobile workers, the Security in a Remote Access World report from iboss found that CEO, CIO, CISO and CTO respondents were vastly more confident in their organizations’ ability to secure mobile traffic than the subordinate IT executives responsible for making it happen: 56% of the C-suite were doubtful, compared to 80% of IT execs.
The disparity shows that many technology leaders in large enterprises are making strategic decisions based on an incomplete view of the threats targeting their networks.
The results of the survey, which polled a cross-section of large US enterprises, also showed that the rapid growth of mobile employees and distribution of the enterprise are putting immense strain on resources. The proliferation of devices accessing the network is causing bandwidth demands to grow exponentially. At the same time, the blurring of the network perimeter due to a boost in remote access is making it hard for IT to track cybersecurity threats as they attempt to infiltrate the network. About 43% of business-to-business (B2B) IT executives were not confident they could secure their organization’s overall IT systems against malware and other cybersecurity threats in the future.
Along with the rise in remote and mobile employees, three-quarters of respondents (74%) expected an increase in bandwidth demands over the next three years, growing above 10Gbps by 2020. Yet, they continue to invest in legacy infrastructure like on-premises web gateways that aren't capable of efficiently handling that increased demand: 67% will continue investing in on-premises appliances.
While most respondents understand the problem, they have not identified a solution and aren’t prepared to protect remote employees. About a third (32%) of respondents cite the cost of more security appliances as their top concern while planning for bandwidth increases.
“The findings of the survey show two things in stark contrast to each other: Large enterprise organizations know that bandwidth demands are increasing, yet they continue to invest in legacy infrastructure that is not sustainable,” said Paul Martini, CEO and co-founder, iboss. “It’s time for organizations to tackle this problem head on and investigate solutions that are scalable to grow along with their bandwidth demands.”