Calling all Kiwi businesses, are you reporting weekly cyber breaches?

One in eight IT managers across New Zealand and Australia believe security breach attempts occur in their organisation every 60 seconds.

A new report released by Centrify Corporation reveals that nearly half of IT from the region’s managers believe their organisations experience attempted data breaches every week.

While major breaches at iconic brands like Sony and Office of Personnel Management make headlines, Centrify commissioned the survey to evaluate the frequency of breaches on organisations that do not make the front page.

Results showed not only that corporations are vulnerable to attack, they validate Centrify’s hypothesis that protecting identity is at the heart of protecting data.

The survey reports that 46 per cent of IT managers believe their organisations had experienced an attempted security breach in the previous seven days.

Furthermore, 13 per cent - one in eight - believed that such an attack had occurred in the previous 60 seconds.

Reinforcing this concern, a majority of these IT managers (56 per cent) nominate security as their biggest concern for the next year, closely followed by cloud computing (55 per cent).

The third most pressing concern (21 per cent) was mobile applications and management.

The survey of more than 100 IT attendees from New Zealand and Australia at last month’s AusCERT event aimed to find out if corporations are as secure as they need to be.

These local findings tally with the results of Centrify research undertaken in the US and the UK where security is also a leading concern.

Centrify Senior Director APAC Sales Niall King says the survey findings reinforced what customers were telling Centrify.

“The combination of cloud computing and mobile access is creating incredible security headaches for organisations globally,” he adds.

“Because New Zealand is an early adopter of technology, our IT managers are already feeling the stress of defending against the vulnerabilities created by this convergence of mobility and ubiquitous access.

“At Centrify, we believe that identity is the new perimeter. The good news is that with the right tools in place, you can protect your organisation against unrelenting attacks.”

For King, clear finding from the survey is that most IT managers (83 per cent) are as concerned or more concerned about security breaches at their organisations than they were 12 months ago while only five per cent are less concerned.

“The challenge is that today’s corporate perimeter has nothing to do with physical headquarters and contains data that resides in the cloud and on the numerous devices employees and contractors use in the field,” he adds.

“As employees reach for the cloud or their mobiles to get their jobs done, it opens up greater security vulnerabilities.

“As a result, there is greater need than ever for unified identity security across multiple devices and platforms.

“It’s our hope that this survey helps convince IT decision makers to take steps now to enhance identity management before hackers find holes and exploit them.”