Survey Finds Top Concerns for Network And Security Managers

Aug 28, 2007 3:18 PM

Q1 Labs, Waltham, Mass., a network security management company, finds that today's IT managers are plagued with insider threats and internal issues, according to a new survey.

Responding to these concerns requires more complete internal monitoring that integrates with identity and access frameworks to identify who, not just what, is responsible.

A survey of more than 9,000 network and security managers from various industries and organizations found that more than 53 percent of respondents cited security mishaps originating from employees' careless or malicious behavior as their top issue. The upsurge in internal threats or misuse is causing network and security managers to become as vigilant over their internal network and infrastructure as they once were over their network perimeter.

Guarded attentiveness requires a more diverse set of surveillance inputs, sophisticated analysis capabilities and the ability to integrate with existing identity and access management (IAM) frameworks. As noted in a recent Gartner report, "Correlation and analytics can be used to join identity and access data from any sources, and across multiple systems and applications, to construct a complete view of an individual's activity."

According to Tom Turner, vice president of marketing at Q1 Labs, "The old silo'd approach to monitoring network, security and identity information separately is outdated and inefficient, especially in light of the recent rise of insider threats. A command-and-control approach across both the network and security infrastructure that pinpoints user activity is imperative to network health and efficiency."

Additional concerns reported by nearly 30 percent of the survey respondents include addressing auditors, hacking and phishing and log overload.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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