How are organizations protecting their critical IT assets?

Telos unveiled findings from a research conducted by Vanson Bourne that explores how organizations approach network and critical IT asset protection.

The study, which polled 250 information technology, IT security, legal and risk/fraud/compliance professionals, revealed that 99 percent of organizations believe an attack on their critical IT assets would have repercussions not just for their organizations, but for society at large.

Perhaps more concerning, 83 percent of respondents reported having experienced a successful cyber attack in the past two years, with half indicating the attackers managed to reach their critical IT assets.

The results suggest that, as the cyber threat landscape continues to grow in danger and complexity, organizations must take concerted steps to protect their IT networks. This is especially true when it comes to critical assets, in particular within banking, financial services and insurance; healthcare and life sciences; energy and utilities; K-12 education; and higher education sectors, where lost or stolen IT assets could result in devastating consequences for an organization, its customers and the wider society.

The state of critical IT asset protection

• 99 percent believe they need to improve their ability to prevent an attacker from accessing critical assets once they have broken into the network.
• 95 percent of those who have segmented and protected their critical IT assets believe that the assets are better protected as a result.
• Yet, 93 percent believe the tools they are currently using to protect their segmented assets are insufficient to defend their organization against cyber threats.
• 86 percent admitted to having been kept awake at night by concerns about the protection of critical IT assets.

“As hackers and threats continue to grow in sophistication, the importance of locking down critical IT assets is clearer than ever before, yet current security approaches are falling short in achieving that goal,” said Tom Badders, senior product manager at Telos.

“Now is the time for organizations to consider a different approach – and the best way to protect critical assets is to hide them entirely.”

Offering a path forward in today’s threat landscape, 99 percent of respondents who have been kept awake at night by concerns about the protection of critical IT assets agree that they would sleep better if they could hide their network assets by eliminating IP addresses, making them invisible on the public internet via network obfuscation.

In fact, 36 percent of organizations are very concerned that their organization will experience an attack on its critical IT assets in the next 6 months; however, among those using network obfuscation tools, this drops to 24 percent.