TORONTO – Canadian businesses are vulnerable to the loss of data and potential privacy breaches, despite a series of high-profile incidents in which confidential information on company servers have been compromised, according to a survey commissioned by Primus Business Services.
Conducted from October 12 to October 25, 2011, the on-line survey polled a sample of 453 small business owners and IT decision makers in Canada in companies with 2 to 499 employees.
It found that nearly two-thirds (60%) of participating small and medium businesses in Canada invest less than 10% of their budgets in data security despite the fact that a comparable percentage agree that they are concerned with the security and integrity of their business data.
Despite this concern, 74% of respondents claim to not currently have secure off-site storage for their critical business data, and 72% do not currently monitor or manage their data on a 24 x 7 basis. This means that a significant portion of the data residing in the Canadian SMBs that participated in the study continues to be at risk with limited investment being made to both retain and secure it.
In addition, Canada’s SMB owners and IT decision makers polled remain uncertain about the benefits and security of cloud computing, misperceiving it as less secure than maintaining servers in their own offices. Half of respondents reported being concerned with the security of hosting in the cloud, with 40% of those noting they would feel more secure if cloud services had full unified threat management/firewall protection and/or if the cloud was a single-tenant environment, while 48% listed around-the-clock management and alerting as a key factor in quelling their anxieties. Just over 1 in ten (14%) reported hosting their data in the cloud.
“Cloud computing is still a relative enigma, but it’s inherit security, cost and most importantly, time management benefits, will imminently bring it into the mainstream of Canadian business,” said Matt Stein, SVP of network, technology and planning at Primus Canada, in the survey’s press release. “However, it is critical that business decision makers look for providers that offer enterprise quality operational, management and security procedures in a truly scalable model.”
