Deloitte's 6th Annual Global Security Survey
06 Feb 2009
Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu's Global Financial Service Industry (GFSI) group has published their 6th Annual Global Security Survey, which benchmarks IT security and privacy in the financial services industry.
The survey is based on interviews with senior security officers from the world's top global financial institutions in 32 countries. Findings include:
- As in previous surveys, respondents recognise that people are both an organisations greatest asset as well as its weakest link. But security vigilance is even more important in hard economic times, when the increased stress levels can lead people to behave in atypical ways.
- Even though both internal and external security breaches at financial institutions worldwide have fallen over the past 12 months, employee misconduct is a growing concern.
- The growing popularity of social networks and the proliferation of mobile media such as USB keys, MP3 players and PDAs, all cause an extra load on internal and external security. These devices present opportunities for unauthorised download and storage of confidential information in an unprotected medium. This is one of the factors that has contributed to the sudden rise of data protection and information leakage as a top priority for financial institutions – tied at second place with access and identity management.
- The top three information security priorities of financial institutions are:
- security regulatory compliance
- data protection and information leakage
- access and identity management
- In 2008, financial institutions saw a decline in the number of both external (47% vs. 65% in 2007) and internal (27% vs. 30% in 2007) security breaches.
- The leading drivers for financial institutions to protect the privacy of their clients information are privacy regulatory requirements (79%) followed by reputation and brand concerns (70%).