News
Symantec Tool Challenges Small Businesses to Assess their Exposure to Information Risk
July 2010 by Marc Jacob
Symantec Corp. launched a new tool giving small businesses a holistic view of how they measure up against their peers in terms of information protection efficiency and effectiveness. The Symantec Small Business Check-up is a simple-to-complete online questionnaire that enables small businesses to benchmark themselves against survey results from 700 small businesses across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). The comparison allows participants to assess their organisation’s relative vulnerability to data risk and add information about their own environments to the benchmarking tool. The tool then provides them with an analysis of any gaps or inconsistencies that might cause exposure.
The Symantec Small Business Check-up has already revealed that smaller companies share a number of serious vulnerabilities:
• Surprisingly, the majority of small businesses are just as susceptible to information risks as large organisations. According to the research, 80 per cent of small businesses have ‘medium’ to ‘high’ sensitivity to risk. This figure is based on amalgamating their exposure to risk factors including whether they are governed by industry regulation, hold sensitive information, would be disrupted by regulatory breaches, or use mobile technology.
• More than a third of small businesses (35 per cent) have little or no ability to track and audit the way information is created, modified, deleted, accessed and moved. This could leave them exposed to significant risk or potentially facing heavy fines in some instances
• Interestingly, 40 per cent of small businesses have not tested the effectiveness of their backup and recovery arrangements, to make sure they could get their data back in a timely manner following a failure.
