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Study: Security pros felt more pressure to secure their organization in 2014 than year prior

The pressure is on IT security professionals in the coming year, with 57 percent believing they will feel a greater squeeze this year to keep their organization secure.

More than half also felt more pressure to secure their organization in 2014, a new study from Trustwave found. The “2015 Security Pressures Report,” conducted by third-party research firm, surveyed 1,016 full-time IT professionals, the majority of whom work as security managers. The professionals were based in the U.S., U.K. or Canada.

Sixty-four percent of enterprises foresee increased pressure in 2015, as compared to 48 percent of SMBs. This, Greg Rosenberg, security engineer at Trustwave, has more to do with a lack of perception of threats than legitimate less high-stakes situations.

Rosenberg noted that although these smaller companies might think the pressure is off them, in actuality, there might be a gap in knowledge.

“They might not even have their own IT people,” he said. “They're not as plugged in to the risk marketplace, but they still get impacted quite a bit by all these breaches that take place.”

Twenty-four percent of enterprises expect pressures to stay the same this year, as compared to 42 percent of SMBs. More interestingly for Rosenberg, however, was the emerging technology security professionals felt they needed to deploy.

Forty-seven percent of respondents ranked cloud as the emerging technology they felt most pressure to deploy, followed by bring-your-own-device (BYOD), which 22 percent ranked as the technology they felt most pressured to adopt.

“There's very much a shift in place where a lot of people are investing in infrastructure in the cloud and for mobile, so [going forward] we're going to see a lot of novel attacks that we haven't seen before,” Rosenberg said.

Adding to security professionals' pressures could be less familiarity with mobile technology and solutions. While 70 percent of respondents said they believe they are safe from cyber attacks and data compromises, Rosenberg believes there could be a false sense of security, especially considering how attackers are changing up their tactics to adjust to a more mobile and cloud-based environment.

“With the adoption of these smartphones and tablets, mobile device breaches are probably inevitable,” he said.

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