At the end of June, WinMagic had the opportunity to attend Gartner’s 2014 Security & Risk Management Summit. After many sessions, meetings and cocktail receptions, we walked away a little wiser and informed. Over the next few weeks I’ll delve into some of the sessions we attended, and share some stuff we learned from them. But for this blog post, I thought it would be good to share some key highlights/data that we took in from the event.

Here are some interesting stats we took note of:

• By 2020 60% of digital businesses will suffer service failures due to inability of IT security teams to manage digital risk
• Almost 25% of computers lack virus or malware protection
• 90% of vulnerabilities can be mitigated if admin rights aren’t granted to users
• Security is a lower priority for CIOs – ranks 8th
• 70% of organizations take a traditional focus on technology and reactive focus on security
• By 2017 1/3 of enterprises will have a Digital Risk Officer

In looking at some of these numbers above, one of the stats that surprise me is that despite everything that has been happening with security breaches in the news, security doesn’t rank high on the CIO’s priority list. Granted, CISO’s are typically dealing with this today, but ultimately, that rolls up to the CIO. If organizations are more proactive vs. reactive with their security policies, there’s a lot of pain and aggravation that could be avoided if a breach ever occurs.

We’ll cull from our notes over the next few weeks and share more of what we learned from the conference and offer some of our own insight to some of the things we heard.