Partnering with IT consultants to determine areas of security weakness

Security is a foremost issue for enterprises of all kinds. With IT criminals becoming increasingly savvy at penetrating even the most sophisticated networks, there are many threats that business officials need to be recognizing and designing protocols to address.

In order to foster better understanding of the primary security risks that businesses are faced with today, InformationWeek Reports – an organization dedicated to providing IT-based research and analysis – recently released a study entitled "InformationWeek's 2012 Strategic Security Survey."

After surveying 900 IT professionals representing organizations that employ at least 100 staff members, the researchers found that access control was one of the most pressing issues for the respondents. While ensuring that passwords and encryptions are in place to protect the integrity of business data, surprisingly few IT teams engage in this practice, leaving sensitive information vulnerable to attack.

Another major area of concern was malicious links, with 72 percent of respondents expressing fear that they would introduce infectious malware into a network that disrupts computer operations and can gather sensitive information for fraudulent purposes.

But, as Lorna Garey – the content director for InformationWeek Reports reminds: "When it comes to security and risk management, it's tempting to try to address everything, but a more effective approach is to focus on the most likely threats. Implementing better access control, vetting cloud providers, safeguarding mobile devices, educating users and building more secure software should be on every company's security to-do list."

One way for business officials in Ohio to deploy this advice is by partnering with a Cincinatti IT consulting firm. By performing a small network analysis, these professionals can determine the most pressing vulnerabilities of a particular operations and deploy the most relevant security strategies to protect the network from cyber attacks.

From our offices in Dayton, Columbus, Cincinnati and Cleveland, PRO OnCall is your single-source technology consulting service, offering managed IT support, unified communications solutions and on-call IT support.