Security surrounding social media and m-commerce top IT priorities

Menlo Park, Calif. -- Managing and classifying enterprise data is the number one security and privacy area in need of improvement, and remains a major challenge for IT departments, according to a survey about IT risk factors for 2013 published by global consulting firm Protiviti.



The 2013 IT Priorities Survey found that IT executives are struggling to manage the wide variety of technology risk, regulatory compliance and performance challenges that now face them.



Among 21 areas of technical knowledge, survey respondents identified social media security and mobile commerce security as the areas needing most improvement. CIOs and their staffs indicated that they intended to strengthen their cyber security capabilities in order to tackle the growing threat of breaches — and potential incident response procedures — as well as ensuring their compliance with the increasing number of state and federal information security requirements



Executive-level respondents also rated mobile commerce security, policy and integration among their top five priorities in the new survey's technical knowledge section, which contrasts strongly with the 2011 survey in which none of these areas made the top of the list. Interestingly, challenges related to virtualization and cloud computing receded in the rankings compared to 2011, suggesting IT departments have a higher level of confidence in managing these areas.



In other findings:

• The IT function's top priorities are related to strategy and organization, reflecting a need to enhance the clarity and precision with, which IT performance is measured, monitored and reported internally and externally, as needed to customers.

• In terms of IT infrastructure, platform performance planning and storage management and planning are listed as top concerns, with respondents ranking their competency level in these categories at 2.8 on a scale of one to five.