Result of IDC’s latest ‘Middle East IT Security End-User Survey’ shows that the IT security landscape in the region has started to show some signs of maturing as organizations in the region are taking gradual steps to improve their security posture.
Organizations in the Middle East, IDC said, are increasingly deploying advanced security solutions in order to proactively mitigate the security issues that may arise from lack of user awareness, network traffic, and hacktivism.
In addition, organizations have been implementing more expansive training and awareness initiatives to address the security challenges that exist within their corporate IT environments.
Of the IT decision makers and CIOs surveyed, 57% indicated that “maintaining a secure environment” was the biggest technology-related challenge/priority they faced in 2014.
IDC showed in the report that, approximately 50% of the survey respondents listed “ensuring IT performance” as their second major concern, highlighting the fact that organizations in the region are concerned about sustaining business availability and performance.
The responses also reflect the fact that the security landscape evolves at a faster rate than investments in IT security solutions. Furthermore, the results show that organizations in the Middle East are facing other serious challenges, such as “ensuring availability of systems and applications”, “improving the utilization of IT assets”, and “managing connectivity”, to name just a few.
Unlike IT decision makers and CIOs, IT managers in the region identified “the increasing sophistication of attacks”, “the lack of executive management support”, and “the lack of an information security strategy” as their top three enterprise security challenges. “There is a clear disconnect between IT decision makers and IT departments in terms of how to better manage security,” said Megha Kumar, research manager for software at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey. “Decision makers or CIOs see skills as the main hindrance, while IT managers state that there is a lack of support for their security solutions.
“Both CIOs and IT managers stated that there is a clear lack of IT security strategies. This shows that a major gap still exists between business and IT when it comes to implementing more robust and dynamic security strategies.”
The survey results show that organizations in the region are investing in various security initiatives, albeit facing various security challenges.
To this end, the major investment areas in 2014 were “Firewalls, intrusion detection, and prevention” and “anti-malware and data-loss prevention”. “It is worth noting that there is a growing emphasis on the deployment of next-generation firewalls that provide analytical insights on network traffic flow to better secure enterprise perimeters,” continued Kumar.
IDC expects Middle East organizations to proactively continue investing in IT security solutions in order to protect their business assets, thereby achieving their business objectives.
To ensure a comprehensive security stance and simplify security management, organizations in the region will need to consider a mix of on-premise security solutions and third-party security services.
Considering organizations in the region are adopting the 3rd Platform technologies – cloud computing, social business, Big Data/analytics, and mobility – they will need to constantly work on balancing both their IT priorities and security posture.