UK: 9 in 10 businesses concerned they will fall victim to security breaches

However, according to data from Trend Micro, more than eight in ten (85 percent) of organisations are leaving their IT infrastructure open to threats by using the same security technology as they were in their physical computing environments.

Research also finds that 93 percent of organisations think virtualization has contributed to the complexity of IT infrastructure with 92 percent struggling to keep their systems secure. With only one in ten (11 percent) organisations suggesting their security systems are completely up-to-date, it is not surprising that two thirds of organisations have admitted they have experienced a security breach in recent months. Alarmingly, only 52 percent of these breaches were discovered by internal security monitoring tools with just 48 percent of organisations being alerted by systems outage, a third party or by accident.

Results point out that British businesses recognise the importance of factoring security into their virtualization roadmap with 95 percent stating that security is an integral part of moving to a virtualized environment. However, the majority of organisations are not acting on this belief. Findings show that 59 percent admit to not consulting security teams throughout virtualization deployments. This failure to adopt a new security mind-set for virtualized environments is leaving businesses open to risk with two thirds having experienced a security breach in the last five years. More than 9 in 10 businesses remain concerned that they will fall victim to future security breaches.

The Trend Micro survey reveals that over two in five (44 percent) of organisations with a virtualized environment either use or plan to use an Infrastructure-as-a-Service provider, with the majority (61 percent) of organisations purchasing security as part of the service. Almost four in ten (39 percent) of those using IaaS believe that its use has made managing IT security more complex.

The study was conducted by Trend Micro in collaboration with Vanson Bourne.