Ineffective security management by companies leads to slow Internet speeds and security vulnerabilities, says Network Box

Published 6th January 2009

Nearly two-thirds of UK businesses do not look after their Internet security effectively, according to new research. A survey undertaken by managed security firm, Network Box (www.network-box.co.uk), found that just over 65 per cent of companies spend ‘no time’ managing their security systems (anti-virus, anti-spam, content filtering, VPN, intrusion detection and web usage and bandwidth policies). Nearly 15 (14.7) per cent spend less than 30 minutes per week managing their IT security.

Just over half (54 per cent) of companies don’t have a web usage monitoring policy in place to manage bandwidth. And yet nearly 70 per cent of companies said they regularly notice a slow-down in web access speeds. Productivity is affected, too: companies surveyed estimated that, on average, they could save around half and hour of time per day, per employee, if 80 per cent of non-work-related web usage was stopped.

Simon Heron, Internet Security Analyst for Network Box, says: “IT managers have been led to believe that they can put antivirus and anti-spam systems on their network, and that’s the job done. This simply isn’t the case. Policies and systems need updating, bandwidth use needs monitoring and employees need to be made aware of the risks facing them online. Your security is only as good as you make it.

“Bandwidth management is crucial, particularly with the growth over the last 12 months of online video, TV, file sharing and music. Things we take for granted, like uploading photos to Flickr, watching TV on iPlayer, listening to Internet Radio and storing iTunes, can all take up a huge amount of bandwidth which people tend to think is free. And of course it’s not – companies are paying for that space.”

The survey also found that more than one third (37.3 per cent) of companies still don’t protect themselves from phishing attacks, despite the growth in phishing attacks over the last three years.

Heron says: “Phishing protection is going to be particularly important in the coming year. In a recession, two things are likely to happen: scammers will target company coffers; and employees may be more vulnerable to the kind of ‘get rich quick’ schemes that phishers use to hook their victims.”

The Network Box survey is based on 440 responses from companies between 200 and 10,000 employees.