NINETY-three percent of companies that have more than 100 employees attach importance or major importance to IT security, according to a poll released on October 21.
State administration employees unanimously attach importance to IT security. However, only 25 percent of those employees think that the state administration pays adequate attention to IT security, according to a poll called "IT security in Slovakia" carried out by the Data Security Management magazine, KPMG and the Slovak National Security Bureau (NBÚ) from July to September 2004, the TASR news agency reported.
The results contained in this 2004 report show that banks, finance and insurance companies are the best-prepared institutions to cope with the threat of a security problem in the information technology sphere. Employees of these three institutions think they are 91-percent prepared for such an eventuality.
Power outage is the most frequently mentioned problem for the companies polled. The second most frequent problems come from computer viruses, which threatened 75 percent of the polled companies.
The most frequent way of contracting a virus is via electronic post or when attached to downloaded files.
The companies also estimated their financial losses given an IT system failure. The most expensive financial loss mentioned was Sk500,000 (€13,000) if a software error occurs. On the other hand, the financial loss can be as low as Sk7,500 (€193) when it's human error involving a company employee.
However, only 46 percent of Slovak companies have crisis management plans ready to be put in place if the IT system fails.
