First published: 31st August 2007
Computerworld Hong Kong and Symantec have recently been heavily promoting their InfoSecurity 2007 survey, which aims to, "help provide some insight to what security standards and benchmarks companies should aim for to safeguard their business". Unfortunately, the resulting insight is likely to be biased.
The survey, hosted by SurveyMonkey does not work for users of Mozilla Firefox, the supplied link just redirects to the site home page. The site works fine in the most commonly used browser, Internet Explorer, but it is probable that Firefox users have a distinctly different view of security from IE users.
Also, some of the questions in the survey do not cosider all possible responses, for example, the question, "When do you plan to roll out Windows Vista throughout your enterprise?" does not have choices such as, "never", "we use Macs", or "we are intending to abandon Microsoft operating systems for an alternative". Again, a systematic bias is introduced.
The results of the survey will, no doubt, be interesting, but it should be bourne in mind that the results will reflect only part of the security landscape of Hong Kong businesses.