Is my organisation secure?

To get an insight on various security concerns of an enterprise today, we spoke to CIOs and CSOs across various verticals

Aparna Lal

Information security is the most important challenge that confronts an enterprise today. Enterprises face threats in various forms and from various sources. While organisations have to ensure strong firewalls to ward off external threats, threats form Intranets, LANs and other internal resources keep popping up day in and day out.

IT managers continously look for answers to questions such as—Is my organisation secure after I have taken appropriate measures to secure the perimeter? Are we at no risk because we have installed best-of-breed products? Should we protect assets that are most critical to the organisation and forget about the rest? How much security is good security? What should be done to say I am 100 per cent secure?

To get an insight on various security concerns of an enterprise today, CIOL spoke to CIOs and CSOs across various verticals.

Information security is critical

“Information security has been identified as critical and included as part of our business priority for the year", says CS Murty, Chief of Information Management, Tata Ryerson

All CIOs were unanimous that information security is critical for the success of any business. “Information security has been identified as critical and included as part of our business priority for the year. We have decided to implement the required security measures which will cover all the IT equipment and processes and have provided adequate budget allocation to achieve the same,” says CS Murty, Chief of Information Management, Tata Ryerson.

According to Prasenjit Mukherjee, Manager IT and Training, Reliance Energy Ltd ., “Information security vulnerabilities have increased along with the expansion of information system. Providing easier access to operational, customer, and supplier information, combined with the expansion of corporate IT boundaries due to merger and acquisitions, has vastly increased the security vulnerabilities of power company networks. As a result, the impact of a security breach goes beyond operational concerns, and can have a devastating impact on the financial well being of a company. As power utilities, we must always remain vigilant about the protection of our electricity management and SCADA systems to ensure that unauthorized access to these systems does not disrupt the service.”

Budgets for security spendings

All the respondents consider information security important and critical. They are all of the view that lost information is lost business. We asked the CIOs if they have separate a budget for deploying security solutions or is it a part of the overall IT budget.

Seventy five per cent of the respondents said they do not have separate budget for security and that it was an integral part of their overall IT budget. Seventeen per cent said that they had separate budget for IT security, which comprised 2 to 10 per cent of the overall IT budget. Eight per cent respondents said they are contemplating separate budget for security purchases by the next fiscal.