Why So Much of a CIO's Day Is Devoted to Security

A growing number of CIOs, other technology leaders and IT professionals are spending a considerable amount of their time troubleshooting security-related issues, according to a recent survey from Viavi Solutions. The resulting report, "State of the Network Study," reveals that a significant number of survey respondents are spending a quarter of a standard work week on the detection and mitigation of threats. One of the trend-drivers is that email and browser-based malware has increased over the past 12 months, as has the overall sophistication of attack methods. "Enterprise network teams are [devoting] more time and resources than ever before to battle security threats," said Douglas Roberts, vice president and general manager of the enterprise and cloud business unit for Viavi Solutions. "Not only are they faced with a growing number of attacks, but hackers are becoming increasingly sophisticated in their methods and malware. Dealing with these types of advanced persistent security threats requires planning, resourcefulness and greater visibility throughout the network to ensure that threat intelligence information is always at hand." The findings also address trends in bandwidth consumption, app performance and unified communications tools, and we've included some of those here. A total of 1,035 global CIOs, IT directors, network engineers and other technology professionals took part in the research.