In the fight to secure their operations with limited IT budgets and resources, mid-sized business leaders want their networks to provide embedded security solutions. More than 70 percent of IT decision makers from businesses ranging in size from 11-500 employees found network-based security solutions improve businesses' overall security, according to a new network security study of 250 IT professionals conducted by Spiceworks and sponsored by CenturyLink, Inc.

Read the study: http://www.centurylink.com/asset/business/enterprise/white-paper/what-it-decision-makers-really-think-gems-network-security-white-paper.pdf.  

"As cyber threats evolve and proliferate, mid-sized businesses face the particular challenge of protecting themselves from the same sophisticated operators as large enterprises, but with far fewer staff and resources," said Vernon Irvin, president of CenturyLink's government, education, medium and small business group. "For today's digital businesses, it's essential for security to be seamless with the network, rather than a series of add-on solutions."

Key Findings

• Nearly 80 percent of IT decision makers in the survey manage network security in-house.

• Survey respondents oversee an average of three wide-area networks (WAN), most commonly fiber/carrier ethernet, broadband and wireless local-area networks (LAN).   

• The IT professionals surveyed identified the primary network connectivity issues they are responsible for addressing as network failovers, reliability, availability, cost and security.

• IT decision makers are comfortable leveraging network-based security capabilities. Survey respondents deploy an average of seven network-based security capabilities, led by anti-virus, anti-malware, anti-spam, and URL filtering/blocking.

• Despite having multiple layers of security protections in place, 82 percent of respondents reported experiencing at least one type of security threat in the past year: 73 percent cited phishing, 48 percent cited ransom/spyware and 36 percent cited other malware.