Is Sharing Data With the Government a Good Idea?

When assessing the most foreboding of cyber-threats for 2016, CIOs and other tech professionals and managers rank social engineering and insider threats at the very top, according to a recent survey from ISACA, the global IT and cyber-security association. In addition, many indicate that virtualized servers and networks pose significant risks to their data center environment, and they're turning to two-factor authentication to respond to the potential issue, among other remedies. Overall, results convey a cyber-security landscape that's getting increasingly complex for enterprise leaders—one involving a broad range of technical, political and human-driven challenges. While most survey respondents believe, for example, that the private and public sectors should share threat information, they do not feel they should grant the government backdoor access to their encrypted information systems. They're in favor of regulation that would require companies to notify customers about a data breach within 30 days of its discovery. But they worry that such disclosure could cause irreparable reputational damage. Given the escalating presence of threats as a whole, it's not surprising that a great deal of IT pros say their company will boost security staffing this year. An estimated 2,920 ISACA members worldwide took part in the research.