F5 Networks, Inc., yesterday announced the results of their 2013 RSA Security Trends Survey, conducted last week at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, CA. The key finding of this survey is that many organizations are finding it difficult to keep up with the rapidly-changing security environment. In the report, F5 lists the respondents’ top security impacts, and how they feel about traditional safeguards.
The survey, which was conducted on the Exhibit Hall floor, had over 150 respondents who had responsibility in the areas of IT security planning, management, oversight and implementation. From these 150+ respondents, F5 Networks found that the top three IT trends impacting security are Virtualization (73%), increasingly complex attacks (72%) and BYOD (66%).
When it came down to virtualization, 37% of respondents said that their organizations are not adequately prepared to handle threats on web-based applications, while 49% said that they are not prepared to handle cloud-based infrastructure attacks. Over 2/3 of respondents, however, did recognize the trend potential for both of these systems, but were not assured of traditional safeguards’ ability to protect their organizations.
In fact, almost 50% of the respondents said that they think traditional safeguards are less than adequate at protecting against today’s security attacks. According to the survey results, the top three trends causing traditional safeguards to fall short are: Complexity of SSL certification management (53%), Increase in cloud-based data centers (49%) and complexity of threats (48%). 45% of Respondents listed BYOD, the third-highest trend overall, as being too complex for traditional safeguards.
Though respondents listed BYOD as one of the more complex security trends, 75% said that it is prevalent in their organization. In addition, 35% of these respondents said that they feel their organization is not well-prepared to provide adequate security levels for this trend.
To guard against potential threats, F5 Networks suggests having secure web-based firewalls for web applications, centralized and flexible access policy controls and a DNSSEC solution. For full survey results, please visit the site here.
