Bangalore: Indian Information Technology managers suffer from the weakness Lady Macbeth found in her husband. When it comes to data security, they let `I dare not' wait upon `I would' — and by failing to act on their knowledge of potential threats, they endanger their operations, says market research firm IDC.

A survey sponsored by Net security specialists, Symantec, has found that an overwhelming majority of the 429 mid-sized companies covered, began and ended their countermeasures with anti-virus software — ignoring firewalls, pop-up and spam blocking, encryption and intrusion detection. The survey report was released this week.

Delhi the leader

Delhi leads in the number of organisations — 93 per cent — which have a security policy in place, followed by Mumbai and Chennai. The three cities are also champions of internal security audits. The laggards in security policy include Kolkata — and surprisingly two of the so-called IT-savvy cities, Pune and Hyderabad.

Among the industry sectors which attract the Net baddies, life sciences followed by manufacturing reported the highest incidence of attacks. The call centre industry is better off.

Parijat Chakraborty, IDC's Head, User Research, told The Hindu that a recurrent perception among those polled was that anti-spam filters, installed to weed out unsolicited junk mail, did not work too well. After anti-virus (100 per cent) and firewalls (66 per cent) this at 49 per cent was the most used security product.

Symantec's recent research has found that six out of 10 e-mails received these days are spam, while 80 per cent of viruses and worms come via e-mail, which is being called the `beast that grows.' For, the number of mails exchanged seems to be galloping. More data will be generated in the next three years than in the last 4,000 years. The number of users on the Internet, currently short of a billion, is expected to double by 2007. Over three-fourths of all corporate information reside in email, says technical analyst Gartner. After Symantec acquired the storage management leader Veritas in July, the combo has become the world's number four software company with its portfolio straddling both internal and external data security.

At an Indian user seminar last week. Steven Leonard, senior vice-president, Asia- Pacific/Japan, announced the enlarged company's new mantra: "Information Integrity"— with a bamboo-like motif: a strong infrastructure that is also flexible to business needs.

Product Manager Robert Pragnell launched two new products in India to continuously back up data and recover smartly in case of a disaster.

However, for lay computer users, Symantec "are the Norton guys" — known for their PC-based anti-virus and Net security solutions, whose new 2006 editions have just hit the market.

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