Company IT fails the security test

Survey reveals that the majority of corporate systems regularly lose data

The growing reliance on networks for mission-critical applications has increased the vulnerability of corporates, according to a recent poll.

The annual Securicor Secur IT survey found major failings in corporate systems? reliability and users? disaster recovery planning, with over 50 per cent of corporate IT systems regularly losing data and most users exhibiting a lack of security.

About 80 per cent of companies now rely on either PC Lan or Unix networks for mission-critical applications, 10 per cent admitted network failures occurred once a week and nearly 20 per cent said their networks failed once a month. Few companies were able to show they had backup procedures in place to cope with the losses.

Bob Garrett, Secur IT?s marketing manager, said: ?In a technologically driven industry, greater use of technology is not always the solution. Organisations should look at their processes rather than the equipment and concentrate on improving security procedures. Our survey reveals some alarming statistics with many of the failures due to inadequate data security precautions.?

In 1994, the survey reported that 30 per cent of corporations intended to adopt disaster recovery plans but it seems that many didn?t do so, as this year 46 per cent of respondents declared there were no such plans in place. Twelve per cent said they had no need for a disaster recovery strategy.

The survey interviewed the IT department heads of over 600 corporations in September 1996.