Sophos warns of IT overstretch

Despite a marked awareness of the risks posed by viruses and hackers, many IT firms lack the funding, time and workforce to shore up enterprise security, Sophos reveals.

The organisation's senior technology consultant Graham Cluley has warned that nine out of ten workplace PCs do not stand up to basic security testing, a revelation that may encourage IT teams to make the switch to reliable web hosting and other managed services.

In an entry on the company's corporate blog earlier this month, Mr Cluley claimed that the main problems posed by networked office PCs are that they lack full security updates and have not been configured to run antivirus and firewalls correctly.

He lamented: "The problem, generally, is that the IT teams are overstretched, overworked, underpaid and so they don't necessarily have the right resources to control this."

Sophos gathered the data using its Endpoint Assessment Test, which revealed that 59.1 per cent of PCs were missing a Windows update patch, while a further 36.3 per cent were missing an Office update.