Survey Says… Protection of Intellectual Property is Top Priority

This is the last post in a three-part series highlighting the results from a Palo Alto Networks survey of 233 Ignite 2015 attendees at the end of March. The survey uncovered what’s keeping security professionals up at night, cybersecurity pain points, and what specific concerns they have for their organizations. (Part one, part two)

Based on the previous two posts in this series, we know that boards of directors are taking an active interest in cybersecurity, and we know that cybersecurity professionals are most concerned about zero-day attacks and evasive malware. But what are they so eager to protect?

Perhaps not surprisingly, theft of intellectual property ranked highest on the list. Theft of personal information came in a close second, with denial of service attacks and theft of financial records rounding out the top of the list.

Intellectual property is the crown jewel of many organizations. This is the data that, if compromised, poses the greatest competitive risk to organizations large and small. And as many recent breaches have demonstrated, theft of personal information poses unmatched reputational risk even to those companies without intellectual property to secure.

To counter these risks and protect this valuable data, detection and remediation are not sufficient strategies. Instead, we must focus on preventing attacks before a malicious actor is able to exfiltrate valuable data.

As Palo Alto Networks emphasized at Ignite this year, we’re taking on cyberattackers and aiming to make the cost of network infiltration higher than the potential rewards. We do this by combining network, cloud and endpoint security into a tightly integrated enterprise security platform that delivers automated prevention against known and unknown threats at every point in the kill chain.

We’ll repeat this survey on an ongoing basis and we’ll share the latest results and their evolution over time.

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