McAfee White Paper Sample

Sacrifice they do. More than half of the midsize organizations surveyed in France spend an hour or less on proactive security each week, with the result that 73 percent took longer than 24 hours to recover from a security breach. Likewise in China, 40 percent of the midsize organizations surveyed spend mere minutes on proactive security weekly and 86 percent find themselves still in clean-up mode 24 hours after an incident. Our research shows that in the past year midsize organizations in the United States have spent a total of $17.2 billion fixing IT security incidents. On average, in 2008 a single midsize organization in the United States spent more than $75,000 a year on IT security incidents.

This is what creates the “midsize paradox”—a long list of threats and the cost of ignoring them weighed against a resource investment rarely up to the challenge. Since IT professionals are cognizant of the increasing risk to their companies, not to mention its potential impact on the business’s bottom line, why are security budgets still negotiable? We have a few ideas.