Insight Into Benelux IT Security Priorities

Last month I was invited to speak at our Executive Summit in Amsterdam, where 100 or so CIOs, CEOs and other executives from the Benelux area came to hear what McAfee was up to, and tell us where we were going right (and wrong).
Not content with talking at them for the day, we plied them with good wine, crispy bread and sandwiches which you could never find the equal in Subway or Quiznos. We also gave out some homework, asking participants to complete a survey of their security concerns which came back with some interesting results:
First up, we asked what the top 5 priorities were for 2010. You can see from the chart below that “Data Protection” (51%) (preventing leakage of personal information etc) and “Security & Compliance Management” (49%) (proving the protection of data etc) were clearly the most important. This is interesting because, perhaps unexpectedly, Europe does not have strong data disclosure regulations like perhaps seen in the USA. It’s true that some European countries have data protection regulations, for example the “Data Protection Act” in the UK, they tend not to insist on mandatory disclosure of loss, which is one of the prime drivers of data protection in the USA.

Bottom of the list is “System Security” with 15% (continue reading...)