Research from data company EMC suggests that UK enterprises trust security and resilience of IT systems much less than their Chinese and US counterparts.
The EMC Global IT Trust Curve survey, administered by independent market research firm Vanson Bourne, is based on 3,200 interviews from across 16 countries and 10 industry sectors.
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The report revealed the surprising fact that the Chinese trust their IT the most while the Japanese are the most cynical. However, the UK was well down the ranking, suggesting that most companies did not trust their IT.
Rashmi Knowles, chief security architect at RSA, and David Cripps, CISO at Investec, discussed the research findings at a roundtable hosted by EMC. They said the report's findings suggested that businesses in the US have done a substantially better job than those in the UK of dealing with the challenges caused by legacy systems and fast-evolving threats.
Knowles said the survey's results indicated that US IT managers might be better at communicating the importance of their work to the rest of the business than their UK counterparts.
The findings may also reflect the fact that the average annual cost of data loss (£718,800) and security breaches (£808,600) in the UK is well above the global average.
Generally trust in IT is much lower than Knowles and Cripps expected, with 45 per cent of all respondents having no faith in their organisations' IT infrastructure.
On average 61 per cent of respondents globally said that their organisation had experienced a security breach, major data loss or unplanned downtime in the past year.
Talking to Computing, EMC product marketing manager – data protection – Mark Galpin said that the report is bad news for the UK given that megatrends in information technology, big data, social networking and mobile devices, depend on a "sea of trust".
Companies need to be certain that their data is safe in the cloud, or will not be lost or stolen and that the IT will be operational when it needs to be, he said.
Galpin added that the more trust that IT managers can earn and guarantee for their data projects, the bigger and faster the impact of these trends will become – both to their companies and IT generally.
"The less trust that is established, the more limited IT, big data, social networking and mobile device projects will be. The fact that the UK falls low in the IT Trust maturity curve could affect a company's ability to compete," Galpin said.
