Most organizations are addressing the need for IT governance as an important matter. In a study conducted by Gartner in April 2015, 71 percent of respondents indicated that IT risk management data has influence at the board level. Alarmingly however, only 30 percent of respondents said business units are actively involved in developing security policies that will impact their businesses.

Remaining ahead of the curb is crucial in cybersecurity. Organizations that are vulnerable to cyber-attacks must ensure their lines of protection are not outdated – falling behind in this aspect results in a loss of ground to potential hackers. There are innumerable network solutions that are currently on the market that bolster network security and help drastically reduce the risk of an attack. But as the market grows, it makes choosing a plan of defense increasingly complex, let alone selecting appropriate solutions.

Healthcare organizations have increasingly become a target for cyber attacks. Numerous malicious, large scale health data breaches have taken place this year such as the Anthem data breach, which affected nearly 80 million individuals.[1]More recently, UCLA Health suffered a massive data breach in May 2015, where hackers accessed the medical files of more than 4.5 million patients, according to a UCLA Health notice published in July.[2]According to a 2015 Harris Poll commissioned by Vormetric Data Security, 26 percent of healthcare IT decision makers are protecting data because of a data breach in the past.[3] The report also stated that 48 percent of U.S. healthcare organizations reported either encountering a data breach or failing a compliance audit in the last year.

The emergence of large-scale use of Internet of Things (IoT) – a digital network of devices that may be used to record and transmit data – may extend the horizons of internet technology indefinitely. Social networks currently allow people to connect and interact with one another digitally. When the IoT becomes commercially available, it will give individuals the opportunity to interact with devices, and devices the ability to interact with each other on a network that would dwarf the magnitude of today’s cloud. Due to its projected pervasiveness in the global market, it is not surprising that this is – and will continue to be – a hot topic beyond IT.

Last year the U.S. government faced what is believed to be the largest cyberattack, as the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) discovered an intrusion into personal information of more than 4 million current and former federal employees, according to a recent OPM press release.

Viable technological solutions are widely available to assist companies in maintaining an appropriate level of protection against cybersecurity threats; however, there appears to be a widespread unwillingness by companies – big and small – to invest in adequate, up to date technological products. The unfortunate truth is that it is an investment enterprises overlook or simply marginalize. A recent July 2015 Help Net Security study concluded that 22% of CIOs and security managers say their networks were breached in the last 12 months, and yet a staggering 63% have trouble convincing top management that AETs (advanced evasion techniques) – network breaching techniques that implement a multitude of current evasion methods in order to create a new one – exist and are costly.