CIOs: Meeting the Challenges of Securing Data
This week’s Voices of the Industry article comes from the Digital Realty blog, where John McCarthy, Vice President at Forrester Research explains how CIOs are meeting the challenge of securing data in today’s data center.
John McCarthy, VP Forrester Research
Forrester Research reports that nearly 70% of the CIOs surveyed about their near term spending plans expected that the portion of their IT budget committed to security would increase. In fact, Forrester’s research shows that companies’ investment in securing data is increasing at double the rate of overall IT investment.
The reason is simple. Nobody wants to be the next victim of a data breach, like Target in 2013.
The challenges of the current data security environment are complex:
- With the rise of eBusiness, companies are now custodians of vast amounts of sensitive information about their customers, including credit card numbers and banking data, that make them an attractive object for attack. Cloud storage of customer data invites a whole new level of security concerns. Whether data is stored locally or in the cloud, the overall security environment must be fortified. Older protections are obsolete or have been hacked.
- The proliferation of apps and the overlap among them creates openings for hackers and their bots. Many CIOs today are busy weeding the app garden to simplify security and close loopholes that create vulnerabilities.
- CIOs should identify which apps deliver the greatest business benefit. These are the keepers. Once the small core portfolio of apps has been selected, companies should work to make them invulnerable to assault.
Simplicity is the friend of security. So is investment—in both methodology and infrastructure.
It is unlikely that any marketing campaign will ever generate more revenue than the revenue put at risk by a major security breach. As more companies come to this realization, we may see serious pressure on IT budgets for the next few years.
These are a few of the insights that Forrester analyst John C. McCarthy and colleagues explore in a new white paper called Technology Spending is Reaching a Tipping Point. To read other data center executive insights visit the Digital Realty Blog.
