Study: Organizations Not Ready for Web 2.0

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Secure Computing Corporation (NASDAQ: SCUR), a leading enterprise gateway security company, today announced the results of a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Secure Computing. The study, which surveyed 153 IT professionals and security decision makers in companies with at least 1,000 employees, found—among other things—that while Web 2.0 usage is already prevalent in enterprises, organizations are not prepared to deal with the potential threats associated with the technology. The study further notes a lack of risk awareness, user training and consistent policies.

The study suggests that about half of the organizations surveyed spent more than 25 thousand dollars in the last fiscal year on malware remediation. It was therefore not surprising to learn that businesses are wary of Web 2.0 usage and associated threats. While 97 percent of all enterprise IT staff consider themselves “prepared,” 79 percent have reported frequent attacks from malware. In addition, 79 percent of those surveyed are concerned about viruses, and 77 percent about Trojans, but only 12% were concerned about botnets even though bot networks have been growing rapidly as demonstrated by the recent estimate that the storm threat was propagated by over 1 million computers in a single botnet. These findings confirm that the majority of today’s enterprises are still concerned—to a considerable degree—about Web 2.0 threats in their organizations.

Other significant findings include:

It costs organizations from $15 – 30 per user per year to recover from malware threats alone