Over 2,800 IT professionals, representing diverse industries including manufacturing, healthcare, education and financial services, as well as Astaro's channel partners participated in a market-trend survey on topics ranging from IT security tools, managed services, key challenges and planned investments.
Today, 100 per cent of those surveyed said they relied on firewalls as their first line of defence against outside attacks. Anti-virus (91.5 per cent) and anti-spam scanners (90 per cent) are also listed among the top three security technologies in use, closely followed by VPN products (81 per cent) and intrusion protection systems (74 per cent).
The survey found that 70 percent of respondents are concerned with preventing unauthorised users from accessing the corporate network or confidential data. A similar number of respondents (72 percent) responded that keeping an overview of possible security weak points will be the biggest challenge for IT departments over the next five years. Other top concerns include protection against worms and hacker attacks.
"Today companies are finding that they can't rely on the basic network security they had in place just a few years ago", said Jan Hichert, CEO at Astaro Corporation. "Network administrators are continuously faced with the task of updating and adding layers of protection in order to keep their networks secure against the latest threats. Astaro's content inspection framework allows us to integrate best of breed, cutting-edge, security technology seamlessly into our security offering, giving Astaro users the piece of mind that they have the most up-to-date security tools available."
With 22 percent of those surveyed already using email encryption, and over 67 percent saying that they are worried about how to prevent leakage of confidential company data, the survey suggests that the use of email encryption is poised to rise significantly in the near future.