Asian enterprises are revising their information security strategies, according to a newly released broad-based IT security survey by Fortinet.
Seventy-four percent of the respondents conducted a full reappraisal of their information security strategy in the last 12 months.
The findings of the survey conducted on 350 IT professionals in medium to very large sized enterprises across Asia reveal that the top two areas of improvement are comprehensiveness of coverage and cost of their IT security implementation.
About 71 percent of respondents in Singapore said comprehensiveness of coverage is their number one priority and 58 percent of those surveyed in Hong Kong cited cost effectiveness as their top concern.
Thirty-six percent of respondents in Asia named cloud computing as the most important driver for the strategy changes.
"The remarkable pace of cloud computing adoption and the growing trend of employees plugging their personal devices to the corporate network are posing serious challenges to traditionally secured networks," said Patrice Perche, senior vice president of international sales and support at Fortinet.
Securing corporate data
An overwhelming majority (85 percent) of respondents showed concern about their firms' ability to secure corporate data in a new user-led IT environment. Fortinet says that today, individual users, instead of enterprises, define the preferred IT practices and technologies they want to use.
Ninety-four percent of respondents have a mobile security strategy in place and 67 percent of respondents said they only allow the use of corporate mobile devices onto which security policies can be directly enforced.
Eighty-six percent of those surveyed in Japan find wireless networks to be very vulnerable. Sixty-one percent of respondents in South Korea and 55 percent in Hong Kong see wireless networks as their top threat.
Forty-two percent of the respondents are either using or plan to use a firewall with application control features. Forty-five percent of the overall sample is now using, or planning to use, specialised Web application and XML firewalls to secure Web-based applications.
"IT departments and dedicated information security professionals face challenges from all directions as they fight to maintain a coherent security strategy that both protects data, and responds to the changing needs of users and the business at large," added Perche. "Organisations that can call upon the common technology approach of an end-to-end security solution family are best set to meet these challenges without complicating management processes, compromising performance, or adding unnecessary financial overheads."