Survey Finds That 91% of Organizations Perceive Cybercrime as a Major Business Risk

Finjan Inc., a provider of secure web gateway solutions for the enterprise market, announced the findings of its Web security survey of 1387 IT/Security professionals conducted during July 2008. The results reveal that an overwhelming number of respondents perceive cybercrime as a major business risk, specifically the possibility of their sensitive information such as customer, patient, and employee data being stolen by crimeware.

Key findings from the survey:

--91% of all respondents stated that they perceive cybercrime as a major business risk (e.g. loss of customers, brand name damage, lawsuits etc.)

--73% of the all responding CIOs and CSOs were more concerned about data theft (crimeware stealing their business data) than about downtime and loss of productivity due to virus infections
--The majority of the respondents (68%) indicated that their corporate intellectual property and sensitive information is at risk of data-theft

--More than half of the respondents (54%) worry about their corporate employee information being stolen

--47% of all respondents listed theft of their corporate customer information as a major business concern

--In the banking and financial sector, 95% of the respondents perceived cybercrime as a major business risk to their organization

--Of the responding healthcare providers, 73% listed their patients’ medical records as the main potential cybercrime target

--25% of the respondents reported that their data had been breached, with an overwhelming 42% of respondents who could not exclude the possibility of a breach

--67% of respondents knowledgeable about web security listed real-time content inspection technology as the preferred web security solution

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IT Security Spending On The Rise

Spending on IT security will continue to grow next year, according to new data unveiled by Forrester Research, Inc. The Forrester Business Data Services survey, which polled more than 1,200 North American enterprise and SMB security decision-makers, found that 21 percent of respondents expect to increase their IT security budgets in 2009, while nearly three-quarters of those surveyed expect no cutbacks in their security spending. Only 6 percent of respondents anticipate having to cut their security budget next year despite the current economic uncertainty.

Other key findings from the survey include:

• Security makes up 10 percent of overall IT operating budgets in 2008, up from 8 percent last year.
• Nearly 50 percent of respondents report to a board/CEO or an executive committee. Security is no longer embedded within IT.
• Data protection is critical. More than half of respondents said that protecting corporate IP and customer data was their top priority for the next 12 months.
• Companies are realizing the significance of having business continuity and disaster recovery plans in place. Forty-two percent of respondents said it was very important, up from 33 percent from last year.

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Customer and End-User Support Fueling Demand for IT Professionals

Eleven percent of chief information officers (CIOs) surveyed for the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report expect to add staff in the fourth quarter of 2008 and 3 percent forecast personnel reductions. The net 8 percent increase compares with a net 10 percent increase projected last quarter. The majority of respondents, 83 percent, plan to maintain current staffing levels.

Key Findings

--Increased customer and/or end-user support was cited as the leading reason for Information Technology (IT) hiring, replacing business growth, which had been named by CIOs as the primary driver of IT hiring in each of the past 22 quarters.

--Help desk/technical support was cited as the job area experiencing the most growth.

--Firms in the Middle Atlantic region are most optimistic about IT hiring.

--Technology executives in the transportation industry forecast the strongest hiring activity.

For the first time since the question was asked in the second quarter of 2003, increased customer service and/or end-user support (25 percent of the response) overtook business growth (23 percent) as the main reason firms are hiring IT staff. Installation or development of new enterprisewide applications came in third, with 21 percent of the response.

Skills in Demand

Network administration (LAN, WAN) is the technical skill set in strongest demand, according to 70 percent of CIOs. This was followed closely by Windows administration (Server 2000/2003) and desktop support, each at 69 percent. (Note: CIOs polled were allowed multiple responses.)

Technology executives cited help desk/technical support as the job area experiencing the most growth, with 18 percent of the response. The strong showing is consistent with research from HDI, an association for IT service and support professionals, which found that 45 percent of its members planned to increase help desk/technical support hiring in 2008. Networking, which has held the top spot for the past year in the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report, slipped to second at 14 percent, followed by data/database management at 11 percent.

Industry Outlook

Technology executives in the transportation sector, which also includes communications and utilities, forecast the most notable hiring gains in the fourth quarter. Seventeen percent of CIOs plan to add IT staff and 1 percent anticipate personnel reductions, for a net 16 percent increase.

Business services should also see solid IT hiring activity. Fourteen percent of CIOs surveyed plan to add employees and 1 percent foresee staff cutbacks, for a net 13 percent increase. CIOs in the retail and professional services sectors also forecast staffing activity above the national average, with a net 10 percent increase forecast for both industries.

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Firms Slash an Average of $535,000 on Operating Costs from use of Optimized Workforce Scheduling

In an extremely competitive service landscape, Best-in-Class service firms are turning to schedule, dispatch and mobile solutions to: increase the efficiency of their service organizations, deliver better, faster and more accurate service, and to efficiently contain service-related costs. As such these firms are actively taking steps to map processes related to the lifecycle of incoming service work orders and implement optimization tools to boost performance, as indicated in “a recent report by the Aberdeen Group.

Aberdeen’s survey of over 160 companies identified the need for improved workforce utilization as a key driver for service and manufacturing firms to consider work order and scheduling optimization tools. In an attempt to improve utilization, leading firms were two times as likely as all others to utilize optimized scheduling tools and nearly three times as likely to provide their field technicians with mobile tools to access work order or customer/asset related information.

In improving work order management, leading firms were reducing their reliance on paper, developing flexible criteria and rules for their scheduling solutions, and actively leveraging mobile service solutions to provide field workers with adequate access to work order and customer/asset specific information. The study also found increased customer involvement in the service delivery process through access to self-service scenarios or via customer visibility into technician or vehicle location and status.

As a result leading firms were experiencing:

-- A 9% decrease in mean time to repair over the last year

-- A 17% increase in technician productivity over the last year, compared to an 8% increase for all other firms

-- An 8% improvement in meeting promised service response times over the last year

-- A 71% level of workforce utilization, compared to a 50% performance for all other firms

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Study Reveals North American Contact Centers Tap Low Efficiency Potential of Their Workforce Management Practices

The recently published study “Workforce Management Practices in Contact Centers” provided results on numerous topics including Performance Metrics, workforce management resources utilized, investments, processes, tools, and satisfaction with all of the topics for contact centers in North America. The study is sponsored by InVision Software.

The workforce management processes analyzed in the study comprise forecasting of contact volumes, converting the forecasts to required agents, scheduling of agents, intraday forecasts and schedule adjustment, managing the agents’ schedule change requests, staff planning and budgeting as well as real time adherence monitoring and performance results reporting, and satisfaction with WFM practices and tools. From the data collected in the survey it becomes obvious that although workforce management takes on greater significance in all sized contact centers companies only tap the low efficiency potential of their workforce management tools and techniques.

The increase of importance of workforce management (WFM) and the related investment in WFM is reflected in the number of dedicated employees being responsible for the many operations within the whole workforce management process. Contact centers with more than 500 agents raised their full time WFM positions from 17 to 24 between 2006 and 2008 which represents an increase of 41 percent. Also medium-sized contact centers have extended their WFM staff in the last two years and even contact centers with less than 100 agents have 2.5 dedicated WFM positions on average. The number of forecasters and intraday managers increased since 2006: In 2008, 69 percent of all respondents included forecasters (2006: 60 percent) and 68 percent included intraday managers (2006: 58 percent) in their WFM staff.

Focusing on the applied tools and techniques, it is remarkable that adherence monitoring is one of the two main WFM processes that is fulfilled with licensed software by the majority of contact centers. About 90 and more percent of the call centers, except those with less than 100 agents (70 percent), use third party solutions for adherence monitoring. Scheduling is the second operation where licensed solutions are most commonly used. On the other side of the coin, the study reveals that manual approaches and spreadsheets are still very popular among contact center managers. 38 percent use these tools for forecasting, especially in small contact centers (55 percent), and 22 percent use them in terms of performance reporting. It is absolutely worth noting that one third of big call centers also use manual tools or spreadsheets for performance reporting as well as for their forecasts and for converting the forecasts to agents. In total, only 13 percent of all respondents use licensed software solutions for the forecasting.

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5 strategies for quickly and effectively implementing a virtual support center

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Over Half of SMBs Say They Have Not Implemented Email Archiving

A new survey shows that over half of small companies in the United States do not currently have an email archiving system implemented in their organization, while one in four that do rely on end-users to manage email archiving on their own.

The survey of 421 IT executives at small and medium sized businesses in the United States found that 53 percent of those surveyed have not implemented an email archiving system within their organization. The research was carried out by eMediaUSA on behalf of GFI Software, an international developer of email archiving software.

The survey also found among those companies currently using an email archiving solution, 35 percent are relying on end-users to maintain their own email archives, while 35 percent use an in-house solution to archive emails, and 33 percent use tape backups.

Top reasons given for retaining emails included for internal inquiries and investigations (39 percent), for backup (31 percent), for compliance purposes (28 percent), and for reducing the load of mail quotas on Exchange Server (27 percent).

Various reasons were given by those SMBs who said they did not use an email archiving solution and these included the company is too small to need an archiving product (26 percent), they are not impacted by compliance regulations (21 percent), no budget (26 percent), and emails are stored on the mail server (23 percent).

On a positive note, the survey found that 36 percent of respondents consider email archiving important, and 23 percent find it very important. And more than half that use an email archiving solution have had a positive experience using one.

Other key findings from the survey include:

-- 25 percent archive emails indefinitely, while 21 percent keep them 6 months to a year.
-- 47 percent have had to at one point search for an old or deleted email because of compliance purposes.
-- 29 percent say it typically takes less than an hour to find an email from 15 months ago or longer.
-- 40 percent do not feel they are sufficiently informed about compliance and email archiving issues.

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