Shrinking Budgets Tie Hands of Security Pros

An anonymous reader writes "RSA Conference released the results of a recent survey of security professionals regarding the critical security threats and infrastructure issues they currently face, including those exacerbated by the current economic climate. The study indicates that even though practitioners are most concerned about email phishing and securing mobile devices, technologies addressing these needs are at risk of being cut from IT budgets. The survey also asked what technology investments will likely be bypassed or curtailed due to spending freezes and budget cuts."

Comments

Can't budget for human stupidity

[oahazmatt]

We have a very paranoid security department where I work. On top of boot-level encryption, mandatory anti-virus software, various "agents" that try to predict whether or not you would in fact allow some strange program to do what it wants to do, system monitors that make sure everything is up to date and as it should be before you connect to the network, proxies that ban websites with harmful keywords and annoying pop-ups caused by blocking Active-X components, we still get several people throughout the week who report virus infections on their work PCs.

We have people who install Firefox to get around the IE settings so they can visit sites that they know are not permitted. We have people who browse torrent sites and adult sites and are "shocked" when we show them the links in the history. We've had people who blatantly admit "Yeah, I let my kids play on my company issued PC and they find ways around that stuff."

Maybe that's why the security budgets get cut. You can only secure so much until you secure it by locking out the user entirely.