Infotech Lead America: A new report from McAfee suggests that businesses are vulnerable to security breaches due to their inability to properly analyze or store big data.
The report, ‘Needle in a Datastack’ says the ability to detect data breaches within minutes is critical in preventing data loss, yet only 35 percent of firms stated that they have the ability to do this.
In fact, more than a fifth (22 percent) said they would need a day to identify a breach, and five percent said this process would take up to a week. On average, organizations reported that it takes 10 hours for a security breach to be recognized.
The study has revealed that “far too few organizations have real-time access to the simple question ‘am I being breached?’ Only by knowing this, can you stop it from happening,” says Mike Fey, executive vice president and worldwide chief technology officer, McAfee.
Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of respondents claimed they can assess their security status in real-time and they also responded with confidence in their ability to identify in real-time insider threat detection (74 percent), perimeter threats (78 percent), zero day malware (72 percent) and compliance controls (80 percent).
However, of the 58 percent of organizations that said they had suffered a security breach in the last year, just a quarter (24 percent) had recognized it within minutes. In addition, when it came to actually finding the source of the breach, only 14 percent could do so in minutes, while 33 percent said it took a day and 16 percent said a week.
This false confidence highlights a disconnect between the IT department and security professionals within organizations, which is further highlighted when the Needle in a Datastack findings are compared with the with a recent Data Breach Investigations report of security incidents.
Also read: Big Data to drive storage market: IDC
