Press Releases

Next-Generation Firewalls Enhance Security but Add to Management Issues, According to State of Network Security 2013 Survey

New findings from AlgoSec also highlight poor policy visibility and a lack of automation as the significant challenges faced by European organisations

May 23, 2013



London, UKAlgoSec, the market leader in Security Policy Management, has issued its European 2013 State of Network Security Report, based on a survey of 130 IT security and network operations professionals, conducted at the InfoSecurity Europe conference in April 2013.  Results from the survey show that, while adoption of Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) is growing with over a third of organisations deploying them, they also add significantly to security management tasks.  Also, poor visibility of security policies and lack of process automation have the biggest impacts on network security.

Threats from internal sources were also highlighted as a major concern amongst organisations.  Employees accidentally jeopardising security through data leaks or similar errors ranked as the greatest worry for almost half of the survey respondents.  Managing BYOD is also creating additional challenges for IT departments, with respondents saying that employees connecting their own devices to the corporate network increased the risk of security breaches and network outages.

“Organisations are struggling to manage increasingly complex networks – both from a security and operational perspective,” said Paul Clark, AlgoSec’s Regional Director for the UK, Ireland, South Africa & the Middle East.  “Based on the survey results, it’s clear that the biggest challenges for InfoSec and IT teams come with manual processes and poor visibility, which continue to expose organisations to the risk of outages and security breaches, often caused by their own employees and processes.

“Even those that have adopted Next-Generation Firewalls report that increased security comes at the price of more changes, more policies to manage and more complexity.  However, moving away from manual processes and toward automated, centralised management of processes and policies will help organisations to fully realise the potential of NGFWs to improve overall security and reduce costs.”

Key findings from “The State of Network Security 2013:  European Edition” include:

To read the full report visit – https://www.algosec.com/en/resources/network_security_2013.

About AlgoSec
AlgoSec is the market leader for security policy management, enabling organizations to manage security at the speed of business. The AlgoSec Suite of products automates management of complex policies across firewalls, routers, switches, secure web gateways and more. Bridging traditional gaps between security, network and application teams, the AlgoSec Suite improves business agility, increases security and ensures continuous compliance.

More than 1000 of the world’s leading organizations, including 15 of the Fortune 50, rely on AlgoSec for faster security provisioning of business applications, simplified security operations and improved protection against cyber-attacks.

AlgoSec is committed to the success of every single customer, and offers the industry’s only money-back guarantee.

For more information, visit www.AlgoSec.com

Online Resources: