Computer Associates (CA) has released the results of a CA-driven international survey conducted by Quocirca which shows that small and medium businesses (SMBs) remain highly vulnerable to a variety of cyber-threats resulting in unacceptable exposure to significant business risk. Quocirca surveyed 440 senior managers from companies in the US and Europe and highlighted that many SMBs have limited resources, expertise and awareness to deploy the appropriate security measures to protect their IT environments from malicious cyber-threats.
“CA sees the threats to SMBs in the Arab countries as much higher than the survey indicates due to even more limited resources and IT security spending,” said Abdul Karim Riyaz, business technologist at CA in the Arab countries. “Based on CA’s own internal research for this region, we estimate that there are just under five million SMBs who, according to IDC, account for 37 percent of all IT spending. Unfortunately, security tends to take a back seat when it comes to prioritizing IT spending by most regional SMBs.”
The Quocirca study showed that SMBs have relatively limited resources with which to manage their increasingly dense and heterogeneous IT environments. SMB IT environment are surprisingly complex and despite their size, SMBs often wind up with a wide range of hardware and software resources. The survey also identified that data protection processes are often managed manually and therefore frequently neglected. Additionally, SMBs are slow to react to emerging threats with 25 percent confessing that they had not checked the security of their Internet connection in at least a year. Finally, the report states that poor patch management leaves many SMBs open to known security vulnerabilities. To access the Quocirca survey and a CA whitepaper entitled “The Threats You Face: Why Total Protection Matters,” visit http://ca.com/smb/bestpractices.