A third of businesses have no incident response plan, study shows

Arbor Networks has revealed survey results on its incidents response rate, conducted by the Economist Intelligence unit .

The company polled more than 350 business leaders, 73% of them being board members or C-level management personnel from all over the world. Around 31% were from the U.S. with 29% and 36% from Asia Pacific and Europe respectively.

The numbers that caused the most concern were that, in spite of 77% of businesses admitting to being a victim of lost data within the last two years, 38% of them still lacked plans to respond to incidents. Even more surprisingly, a mere 17% of international businesses that took part in the research felt that they had sufficient plans for a security incident. Results showed, however, that these businesses were dependent upon their IT team and outside resources, such as digital forensics experts, indicating a possible disconnection with C-level.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Senior Editor, James Chambers, said that the results from the study were positive though, at the same time, shot a warning to businesses that they need to assign higher priority to incident response.

Chambers said in a statement:

“There is an encouraging trend towards formalising corporate incident response preparations. But with the source and impact of threats becoming harder to predict, executives should make sure that incident response becomes an organisational reflex rather than just a plan pulled down off the shelf.”

For businesses to have a plan in place, they need to ensure that they have the necessary incident management personnel in their workforce and appropriate processes in place. Their IT security recruitment needs to be established, as well as an overall plan of action to combat any downtime or loss of data.