The Hindu Business Line : Survey explodes many myths on IT risk management

Pune, Feb. 20 Symantec, player in the infrastructure software, has launched the second volume of the IT risk management report, revealing that awareness of the importance of risk management was increasing among the IT community.

The survey was conducted on a base of 400 participants. Mr Anil Chakravarthy, Vice-President, Worldwide Enterprise Services, Symantec Corporation, told Business Line that the survey had exploded four myths associated with IT risk.

They included perceptions that IT risk management was focussed only on IT security, it is project-driven, technology only can manage IT risk and IT risk management had already become a formal discipline.

Mr Chakravarthy noted that despite the traditional perceptions associating IT risk primarily with security risks, the survey had indicated emergence of a broader view among IT professionals.

He said that of the survey respondents, 78 per cent gave critical or serious ratings to availability risk as opposed to security (70 per cent), performance (68 per cent) and compliance risk (63 per cent).

Visibility, impact

He noted that the findings had confirmed that security and compliance risk often attracted attention because of their high visibility and impact – 63 per cent of the respondents rated data loss incidents as having a serious impact on their business.

Research at Dartmouth and the University of Virginia had recently determined that a hypothetical supervisory control and data acquisition network failure at an oil refinery would estimate economic impact of $405 million, with the supplier only bearing $255 million of the impact while the others would assume the remaining loss.

Commenting on other myths, Mr Chakravarthy said that 69 per cent expected a minor IT incident once a month, 63 per cent expected a major IT failure at lease once a year, 26 per cent expected a regulatory non-compliance incident at least once a year and 25 per cent expected data loss incident at least once a year.

The survey noted that IT risk management should be seen as an ongoing process to keep pace with the changing business face.

While technology played a critical role in risk mitigation, process issues caused 53 per cent of IT incidents.

Compared with the previous report, process controls such as training and awareness had decreased from nearly 50 per cent to 43 per cent, Mr Chakravarthy said.

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