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Symantec: Online Security Concerns Growing in the Workplace
4/14/2008
Tuesday's report comes on the heels of a related study conducted by Symantec last month that explores IT risk management and its relationship to the "millennial" or post-mainframe workforce. Symantec worked with Applied Research-West to measure IT risk issues surrounding the emerging millennial workforce within companies in the U.S. The study took responses from 600 people, who were split into three groups of 200. The groups were comprised of IT executives, rank-in-file "millennial" end users born after 1980, and members of what Symantec deemed the "older" workforce (born before 1980).
Here are a few of those findings:
- More younger workers of the millennial ilk (66 percent) tend to access Web 2.0 applications, download file-sharing software and use interactive Internet features much more frequently than their older counterparts (13 percent). The latter are probably more busy, experts say, because they tend to be in managerial positions. This probably accounts for the large percentage of users on Facebook and MySpace during office hours.
- Younger workers also tend to take their work home with them on mobile devices such as smart phones and BlackBerrys, storing backup files or even live workflow files on home computers, personal laptops and home servers.
- Another important point that came out of this report is that 89 percent of the IT managers surveyed concede that enterprise risk in the IT space has increased over the last five years, and almost half of those mangers think younger workers have something to do with that risk, posing a "significant new challenge" in the workplace, according to Symantec.
Speaking on the phone from the RSA Conference in San Francisco--where many security pros and analysts are in attendance this week--Andrew Storms opined: "What we take away from these studies and the recent trusted Web site hacks is that this can be applied to Web 2.0 or anything that is Internet-based."
Storms is the director of IT security sperations at San Francisco-based nCircle Network Security. He added that these open secrets now have their basis in usable data for tech managers to take to their companies' finance departments, where they should make their concerns heard as a safeguard against hacks and disappointing IT controls audit results.
"It's different when you have only colloquial evidence but you're seeing with recent events and reports such as these that it's spelled out in plain English with accompanying numbers," Storms said.
Jabulani Leffall is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in the Financial Times of London, Investor's Business Daily, The Economist and CFO Magazine, among others. You can contact Jabulani at editor@entmag.com.
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