US IT Managers are More Confident than European Counterparts in Their Ability to Mitigate Malicious Web Threat Exposure

(07/05/2009)

A survey commissioned by Blue Coat Systems of more than 600 network managers in Europe and the US revealed that US respondents tend to be more confident in their ability to protect against malicious Web threats to their networks than their European counterparts.

24% of US respondents claimed to have experienced “no negative impact on their network” in spite of the fact that malicious Web threats have increased by a factor of five between 2007 and 2008. On the other end of the spectrum, only 18% of the US respondents claimed that malicious attacks had made a significant or very significant impact on their network.

European respondents, on the other hand, were less optimistic: In the UK, only 14% of respondents claimed their network had been unaffected by the impact of escalating Web threats and 34% admitted that malicious threats had made a significant or very significant impact.

While there were differences in outlook about the impact of malicious threats, American and European network managers both professed to lack confidence in knowing what applications are running on the network. The majority (56%) of network managers in the UK and the US were “not confident at all” or only “somewhat confident” in knowing what applications are running on their networks. This fundamental lack of application-level visibility points to an inability to recognize malicious or non-business, recreational applications as well as an inability to identify those that are critical to the business.

In the survey, there was general consensus that the network manager’s task of policing the network had been exacerbated by the increase in the number and type of applications being used by employees (44% of UK respondents and 36% of US respondents claimed that the number of applications used by employees had “doubled or tripled in the last two years”). Many respondents believe that the advent of SOA and Web 2.0 applications made it more difficult to separate out whether application traffic is important, unimportant or malicious.

Of those US and European managers who claimed to have visibility into the nature of applications running across their networks, Europeans believed that a greater portion of corporate bandwidth was being used for non-business and recreational usage, than their US counterparts.

The Spanish were most concerned: with 59% of IT managers (who were able to monitor the nature of applications) believing that 50% or more of their network capacity is being used for non-business or recreational purposes, against 46% of UK respondents. Only 16% of US respondents, who reported visibility into their networks, believe that 50% or more of their network capacity is being used for non-business or recreational purposes.

Commenting on the findings, Nigel Hawthorn VP EMEA marketing and channels of Blue Coat commented, “Although the findings suggest differences in opinion between US and European IT organizations on the level of potential threats, the consensus on an overall lack of visibility into the applications running on the network translates into a diminished ability to optimize and secure the flow of information to users across the network. Optimization and security both start with visibility, something that today is only available from a Blue Coat Application Delivery Network.”

Related topics:  Internet and Web security   Network Security   Security management and policies   Security threats and vulnerabilities 

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