For the coming year, IT shops are prioritizing antivirus, intrusion-prevention and perimeter security products. Low on the security priority list are desktop firewalls, as well as IT and end-user training. (We think that's just plain crazy. If the heightened security awareness across IT has taught us anything in the past few years, it's that you don't solve the problem by simply building more walls. An educated workforce is the best defense.)
Experimenting with new security techniques is costing enterprises. Baker Hill, the software developer, scrapped a $30,000 intrusion-detection software package from Internet Security Systems because it generated more noise than information about real intrusions, according to net admin Beasley. "It was a waste of time. It gave me useless crap," he says.
Now, Baker Hill has gone with a Web application firewall from Teros to police its Web-hosted applications. Instead of reporting on intrusion attempts, the firewall enforces strict rules of acceptable use, kicking out any query that doesn't comply. "The Blaster worm would not be seen as acceptable use, and it's blocked by the firewall," Beasley says.
Other tech findings from our survey:
Asked whether they standardize on a single vendor for most technologies, prefer a best-of-breed approach or mix it up, most respondents (56 percent) said they prefer a combination. Nearly a quarter (23 percent) said they prefer best of breed, and 19 percent said they standardize.
Nearly half (46 percent) of all projects are initiated solely by IT, 32 percent are initiated by business units other than IT, and 22 percent are initiated jointly. The IT-only approach jumped 6 percentage points from last year. We can explain this anecdotally: Last year we learned that most of the projects IT professionals initiated focused on infrastructure and systems upkeep, so the increase in those projects corresponds to this increase of project initiation by IT professionals.
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