Survey: Companies Sacrifice System Security for Better Performance
Photo: Anton Gvozdikov
A recent survey has revealed that IT security personnel at many large corporations are sacrificing critical security measures to meet network performance demands for business applications.
Crossbeam Systems polled nearly 500 IT executives at large, global corporations and found that 90 percent of respondents admit to making this type of security system tradeoff to improve operational functionality.
While the survey found that a large percentage of executives said they would choose security over performance, it found an even greater number that admitted to shutting off functionality in a security product because it was slowing down networks.
The survey results highlight a growing issue in the industry – the challenge of managing security performance, said Chris Christiansen, program vice president of security products and services for IDC.
“The findings suggest the problem may be far greater than generally perceived, and it serves as a call to action for IT security personnel to take the time to test their solutions under real-world conditions, hold their security vendors accountable for the performance of their products, and gain a true understanding of their network requirements,” he said.
The survey found several key factors that revealed a number of additional IT safety instabilities in large companies. According to Crossbeam, a large percentage of IT personnel were not testing the security solutions under real-world conditions, claimed security vendor performance claims were often misleading, failed to plan for the long term and admitted their products were not being fully optimized.
“Crossbeam’s survey results reflect an unsettling trend for many organizations that implement perceived feature-rich solutions like next generation firewalls and other security products,” said Jeff Sherwood, founder and principal security strategist for the Executive Cyber Institute. “On paper, they sound impressive, but in reality, they fail to perform or meet real business objectives.”
The survey was conducted in June and asked a series of questions about the tradeoffs security personnel make between security and performance, and their experiences maintaining performance as they deploy next-generation firewalls.