Annual Survey Reveals Understanding Risk From a Business Perspective Is a Top Network Security Concern for Organizations

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwired - Apr 16, 2014) - AlgoSec, the market leader for Network Security Policy Management, today announced the results of "The State of Network Security 2014: Attitudes and Opinions," a survey of 142 information security and network operations professionals, application owners and compliance officers conducted during the RSA Conference in February 2014. Results from the survey reveal that the biggest challenge for organizations is prioritizing, understanding and addressing vulnerabilities in a business context. Almost all respondents believe that business stakeholders should "own the risk" of their critical applications.

"Recent high-profile cyber attacks have quickly elevated security discussions to the board-level at many organizations. This requires a fundamental shift in how security professionals think and communicate," said Nimmy Reichenberg, Vice President of Marketing and Strategy, AlgoSec. "The survey results underscore the need for security teams to understand business requirements to ensure agility as well as to understand the impact of vulnerabilities on the business for effective risk mitigation."

Key findings from "The State of Network Security 2014: Attitudes and Opinions" include:

• Convoluted security processes threaten productivity and lead to outages. Nearly two-thirds of respondents reported that manual processes, limited visibility into security policies and poor change management practices posed the greatest challenge when managing network security devices. Almost 20 percent of respondents raised the issue of poor communication among key stakeholders across development, security and operations groups, an 80% increase from last year. The inevitable mistakes that arise in this environment create consequences for a growing number of organizations: more than 80 percent experienced network or application outages as a result of out-of-process changes, up from just over half in 2012.

• Insiders continue to pose the greatest risk, but third party vendor security raises significant concerns. Nearly three-quarters of organizations rated accidental data leakage or malicious behavior by insiders as their number one risk, up from less than two-thirds last year. Also, half of respondents who outsource management of security controls or sensitive information were less than confident in their provider's ability to provide protection.

• Pace of cloud adoption picks up, despite concerns about connectivity and security. Last year one in five organizations expected to move more than 40% of their business applications to the cloud; this year more than 15% already use cloud hosting for the majority of their applications. While the advantages have three-quarters of organizations using cloud hosting to some degree, three out of five still worry about ensuring application availability and security with off-site data centers.

Download the full report - "The State of Network Security 2014: Attitudes and Opinions". Additional resources include:

• View the Infographic
• Review the Survey Results
• Learn about Application-Centric Vulnerability Management
• Watch the on-demand Webcast on Managing IT Risk in a Business Context

About AlgoSec
AlgoSec is the market leader for security policy management, enabling organizations to simplify and automate security operations in evolving data centers and networks. More than 1000 of the world's leading organizations, including 15 of the Fortune 50, rely on AlgoSec for faster security provisioning of business applications, streamlined change management, continuous compliance and tighter security.

AlgoSec's application-centric approach orchestrates the management of complex policies across firewalls and related network devices, aligning IT teams for improved business agility.

AlgoSec is committed to the success of every single customer, and offers the industry's only money-back guarantee. For more information, visit www.AlgoSec.com.

Online Resources:

• Hear from AlgoSec Customers
• Visit the AlgoSec blog
• Follow us on Twitter
• Like us on Facebook
• Follow us on LinkedIn
• Find us on YouTube