It’s not just government and defense organizations that are concerned with these attacks, however. The PWC report found that APT also is driving a significant amount of security spending in the consumer products, retail, financial services, entertainment, media and industrial sectors. And while it represents the most visible and dangerous threat at the moment, that’s just one type of security issue. While limited internal resources are focused against APTs, who is protecting the network from all the other security issues, such as viruses, phishing, inappropriate web content and more?

One of the biggest myths about IT security among financial executives is that there is a simple fix out there. Buy a device or an appliance, pull up the drawbridge, and all will be well. It would be nice if that were true, but it’s not. Just as armies need field commanders to stay on top of the ever-shifting battlefield (because battles never go as they’re plotted out on paper), enterprise security requires human beings skilled at making adjustments to react to the ever-changing threats and conditions.

The problem is, when you start to look at the sheer magnitude of the network security challenge, it quickly becomes overwhelming -- even for the best-staffed network security departments at companies with the deepest pockets. What many organizations are coming to realize is that they need a reliable, flexible and scalable approach to managing network security -- one that stops threats at the border rather than at the city gates.

Done correctly, managed network security through the cloud aggregates technologies from the leaders in IP infrastructure and security, and blends them into one simple, scalable system. It also eliminates single points of failure that too often occur in premise-based hardware solutions.

In addition, cloud-based managed network security provides network-based spam filtering that identifies and eliminates current and emerging spam formats. Since this filtering is now being done in the cloud, it reduces the load on mail servers, improving overall email performance and conserving bandwidth through more effective routing of inbound and outbound email.

Overall network performance is improved by scrubbing unwanted and potentially dangerous intrusions in the cloud instead of on-premise. And it results in low up-front and overall costs over the long term ... because just when your organization thinks that it has battened down the hatches, some new threat is sure to emerge that requires an upgrade or a costly update. 

With threat levels expanding exponentially and internal IT security resources dwindling, cloud-based managed network security can be your tactical advantage, giving you the technology (and resources to manage it) without compromising your budget. Because network security is a battle you can’t afford to lose.

James Whitemore is Executive Vice President of West IP Communications, a provider of cloud-based communications for enterprise-level companies (www.westipc.com). He can be reached at jwhitemore@westipc.com.