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The Most Secure Companies Spend The Least?
iPodBoy writes "The Reg has an interesting article with some choice quotes from Gartner, showing that the most secure organisations spend less than the average and that the lowest spending organisations are the most secure. Gartner also had a choice quote for Microsoft, describing Windows as 'the biggest beta test in history,' and warned warned IT security pros not to expect too much from Microsoft's vaunted Trustworthy Computing initiative."
I'd like to know more how the percentage costs were distributed across companies by size and type of company. Also, what is considered a security cost? Are desktop OS upgrades from Win9x to XP lumped in there? I'd love to datamine their raw results and see what the real trends are.
Smaller companies (500) can oftentimes get by with a single fantastic main admin - As your company grows into the thousands, you probably need multiple main admins at multiple satellite offices, each with his or her own way of doing things. That can effect the results - at the same time, that can mitigate the effects of a less qualified admin.
Larger companies also oftentimes have non-sensical bureacratic IT policies . Smaller companies generally trust their individual admin's opinions more often regarding the purchase of new hardware/software, whereas larger corporations tend to make those types of decisions in the boardroom. I don't think there's a technical upside to that, but I might be wrong.
On the flipside, though, I suspect that smaller companies are more apt to hire underexperienced MCSE's as admins because I suspect their salary offerings won't be as high as companies large enough to have been burned multiple times before - but I could be wrong there too - maybe smaller companies have the edge on better people too.
Do companies that provide technical services (not neccesarily in IT - could be anything like civil engineering) gain anything from having a higher percentage of engineering minds on staff, or does that result in a higher rate of people "fiddling" with their computer in ways that make it more vulnerable.
What's the distribution of desktop OS' within these groups? Like WinXP or not, everyone has to at least admit that its substantially more secure than the Win9x series.
What percentage of companies take advantage of the strong group and ipsec policies in Active Directory? Do they make much difference? Has anyone not living in Redmond actually figured IP Sec group policies out yet?
In any case, I think there's way too many variables to start pointing fingers at Microsoft. Sure, their security policies have bordered on moronic at times, but honestly, to the best of my knowledge, there probably isn't a Linux desktop network large enough to compete with the top 100 largest Windows networks. Its a different ballgame at that scale and while the desktop Linux teams are paying close attention to the failures of Microsoft as they develop their products, we don't know how they'll rate until they're actually out there.
My company has a security policy that explicitly states that our users are not allowed to install non-approved software. Yet at the same time I spend large amounts of time removing spy/ad/malware from their computers. So since they aren't installing it, which would be against our policy, where is it coming from? Maybe our policy isn't long enough. Or perhaps we need to use a larger size font, and more BOLD TYPE.